Paranoia in the sense of being concerned with the ill intent of others, not the sense of an irrational worry about about persecution. Much like how the intelligence community itself is said to have institutional paranoia.

While they created a set of patches that would implement the security features that selinux provides, what was actually merged was the result of several years of open collaboration and development towards implementing those features.

There’s general agreement that the idea that the NSA proposed is good and an improvement, but there was, and still is, disagreement about the specific implementation approaches.
To avoid issues, an approach was taken to create a more generic system that selinux would then take advantage of. That’s why selinux, app armor and others can live side by without it being a constant maintenance and security nightmare. Each one lives in their little self contained auditable boxes, and the kernel just makes the “check authorization” function call and it flows into the right module by configuration.

The Linux community was pretty paranoid about the NSA in 2000, so the code definitely got a lot more scrutiny than the typical proposal.

A much easier way to introduce a backdoor would be to start a tiny company that produces some arbitrary piece of hardware which you then add kernel support for.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/input/keyboard - that’s just the keyboard drivers.

Now you’re adding code to the kernel and with the right driver and development ability you can plausibly make changes that have non-obvious impacts, and as a bonus if someone notices, you can just say “oops!” And not be “the god-damned NSA” who everyone expects to be up to something, and instead be 4 humble keyboard enthusiasts with an esoteric set of lighting and input opinions like are a dime a dozen on Kickstarter.

You wouldn’t phrase it like that. Android is based on Linux, and selinux is part of the Linux security subsystem. Android makes use of selinux features, among others, for security sandboxing.

Crawling doesn’t imply not being able to walk. Like, I’m fully an adult and if I’m on the floor I’ll scoot to something rather than standing if it’s not too far.

I think part of it’s that not all propaganda is bad.

There’s probably a term for it, but I’d draw a distinction between “opinion” propaganda and “aspirational” propaganda.

One tries to change your opinion of something, like “cops are good noble and always do the right thing”.
The other encourages the viewer to live up to some ideal. It’s entirely possible for that ideal to also not be great, but even then “I should be” is better than “they are”.

A lot of PSAs and things from the ad council fall in the later category. Like the billboards that basically say “real men are present and emotionally available fathers to their children” or "good parents teach their kids healthy diet and exercise by example”.
They’re openly cases of the government trying to change public opinions or attitudes (which arguably makes them better examples of propaganda than a lot of commercial television), but they don’t feel as objectionable.

“This honest and kind man who always tries to do good and help those around him to the point that it overshadows him being a physically perfect human is the embodiment of the emblematic American man” is more in that aspirational category.

Where have Democrats called Republicans “evil”, or “the enemy within”, or made allusions to having them arrested for political disagreement?

Also, I like how you dismiss a five star general and people who have actually worked with the man as biased, while also ignoring the whole “historians and political scientists who agree with them”.

I stopped reading when you started assuming that anyone who doesn’t agree with you about trump must just be unfamiliar with his supporters and only reading biased news. Don’t be an ass and assume you know the background of the person you’re talking to.

As far as I can tell, you’re a vocal centrist who won’t believe someone has bad intentions just because they tell you what they are. Surrounding themselves with Christian nationalists and detailing their plan to do those things could just be for show, right?

Do you actually know what a fascist is or do you think it’s just a synonym for Nazi?

Harris has never advocated for the communal ownership of the means of production.
People who worked with her don’t describe her as a communist.
There isn’t serious debate about if she’s actually a communist or if she just gets really close to the definition.

a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterised by a dictatorial leader, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy

Is that the definition of fascism, or trumps former chief of staff explaining why he thinks trump is a fascist?

I trust the former head of the joint chiefs of staff, Trump’s former chief of staff, and any number of academics to know what fascism is than I trust you, a person who’s worried about being uncivil to someone who wants to put people in camps.

Like, take a step back and think about what you’re doing. You’re saying it’s insulting and wrong to call a far right populist leader who attempted a coup to stay in power, who has threatened to use the military to bring places that disagree with him into line, who calls his political opponents “the enemy from within” and who calls them evil and their criticism of him illegal a fascist. Even if you don’t see how just that snippet of his behavior warrants the label, why on earth would you care if someone like that was insulted?

We were discussing how he could use his position for good. He could fucking fail at everything he tries to do and leave the country no better and no worse than it is today.
I’m not gonna sit here and jerk the guy off in the hope that he fails at fascism so hard that he somehow deports musk and enacts MAGA-care for all to spite Obama.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna175198

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/totally-illegal-trump-escalates-rhetoric-outlawing-political-dissent-c-rcna174280

https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/current/thought-leadership/2024/10/is-trump-a-fascist/

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/what-does-it-mean-that-donald-trump-is-a-fascist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_and_fascism

My eyes rolled so hard they literally flew out of my head and knocked a wall off the back of my house when I saw your example to justify “hundreds of billions of dollars of waste” was an opinion piece on the $500 toilet seat from 1986.
Spoiler alert: if you read the next few years of news it’s revealed that those stories are almost uniformly exaggerations and misrepresentations driven by Reagan era people who wanted to starve the beast.

Political lies drummed up to justify cutting vital services under the pretenses of “fighting waste”.

You can do whatever you want. I won’t be caught dead cheering for a fascist who wants to rollback civil rights just to give him a fair shot in case he makes a prudent budget cut. Which he won’t, because his platform has openly covered that they want to cut education, healthcare, and science.
But hey, at least you gave the fascists a fair shot despite their open plans for evil, right?

I want what’s best for the country, specifically the people in it, and the world as a whole.
I hope that trump fails because his stated objectives are abhorrent to common decency, fiscal prudence, and functional governance.

What he calls waste I don’t believe for a second is actually waste. He has done nothing to earn my trust in that or any other regard, and so I don’t. Certainly not enough to trust them with something as broad as “waste”, if the fools who think that any scientific research they don’t see the point of is “waste” like so many of the examples have been.

Listening and judging a politician based on their words and actions isn’t being “partisan”. The electorate can’t even be “partisan hacks”, they’re the one’s whose interests and opinions are supposed to be being represented.

It’s not up to the American people to live up to the expectations of politicians. It’s literally a politicians entire job to live up to ours, and do things that benefit us. If the politicians goal is contrary to that end, I hope they fail.
I’m not gonna wish someone who wants to harm me, my family and my friends luck just so that they might not want to in the future. They need to earn my trust, not the other way around.

If they do nothing for four years and things remain exactly the same as today, I’ll count that as a win. If they yell “psych!” and actually do something good I’ll eat a hat.

I’m not honestly sure that we should. Sometimes supporting and wanting what’s best for the country means earnestly hoping the president utterly fails.

I sincerely hope this trump administration accomplishes less than they did last time, ideally nothing.

They do need to be made. By medical professionals. The people who can actually determine who’s viable to save and who can best utilize resources, and who actually know if there even is a shortage. Which there usually isn’t.

The last people you want doing it are the people with a financial incentive to always deny care.

Cool story bro. Keep being angry about the meaning of words I guess, if it makes you happy.

Yeah, I know how it works, and I also know how different types of AI work.

It’s a field from the 50s concerned with making systems that perceive their environment and change how they execute their tasks based on those perceptions to maximize the fulfillment of their task.

Yes, all modern laundry machines utilize AI techniques involving interpolation of sensor readings into a lookup table to pick wash parameters more intelligently.

You’ve let sci-fi notions of what AI is get you mad at a marketing department for realizing that we’re back to being able to label AI stuff correctly.

I love it when people angrily declare that something AI researchers figured out in the 60s can’t be AI because it involves algorithms.

Using an algorithm to take a set of continuous input variables and map them to a set of continuous output variables in a way that maximizes result quality is an AI algorithm, even if it’s using a precomputed lookup table.

AI has been a field since the 1950s. Not every technique for measuring the environment and acting on it needs to be some advanced deep learning model for it to be a product of AI research.

You can’t see a benefit to a washing machine that can wash clothes without you needing to figure out how much soap to add or how many rinse cycles it needs?

I genuinely pity anyone so influenced by marketing that they can’t look at what a feature actually does before deciding they hate it.

Well that’s sort of my point. It’s an algorithm, or set of techniques for making one, that’s been around since the 50s. Being around for a long time doesn’t make it not part of the field of AI.

The field of AI has a long history of the fruits of their research being called “not AI” as soon as it finds practical applications.

The system is taking measurements of its problem area. It’s then altering its behavior to produce a more optimal result given those measurements. That’s what intelligence is. It’s far from the most clever intelligence, and it doesn’t engage in reason or have the ability to learn.

In the last iteration of the AI marketing cycle companies explicitly stopped calling things AI even when it was. Much like how in the next 5-10 years or so we won’t label anything from this generation “AI”, even if something is explicitly using the techniques in a manner that makes sense.

Wouldn’t you know, AI has also been algorithmically based and around since the 1950s?

AI as a field isn’t just neural networks and GPUs invented in the last decade. It includes a lot of stuff we now consider pretty commonplace.
Using some simple variables to measure a few continuous values to make decisions about soap quantity, water to dispense, and the number of rinse cycles is pretty much a text book example of classical AI. Environmental perception and changing actions to maximize the quality of its task outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

The reassuring thing is that AI actually makes sense in a washing machine. Generative AI doesn’t, but that’s not what they use. AI includes learning models of different sorts. Rolling the drum a few times to get a feel for weight, and using a light sensor to check water clarity after the first time water is added lets it go “that’s a decent amount of not super dirty clothes, so I need to add more water, a little less soap, and a longer spin cycle”.

They’re definitely jumping on the marketing train, but problems like that do fall under AI.

Eh, anything interesting is going to be inside and out of sight. The desert is so big that people aren’t going to be sneaking up on it without you noticing.

We’re not going to rely on obscurity to keep our research sites secure. People who have worked at similar secure sites report parking at the meeting building, changing into their work coveralls, going through a security screening and then being driven for an hour or two in a bus with blacked out windows to work in a sealed building with no windows before being driven back in similar conditions.

Using your existing classified development facility has the advantage that you can keep activities at it at a roughly constant level, so anyone watching from a satellite can’t tell if there’s more or less activity that would indicate something interesting. Just make sure that a dozen busses show up every day, regardless of how many people are in them.

It’s similar to how you can tell the Pentagons level of alert by looking at pizza delivery wait times at off hours on Google maps.