I’m in my late 20s. Here I am trying to actively lower my testosterone to reduce my sex drive. I am taking vitex (a.k.a chaste tree) and it’s working wonderfully. I’ve noticed increased concentration, too. I like it a lot, especially since I don’t care for having children and thus don’t have a biological need for sexual thoughts/behaviors. It’s no wonder monks use this stuff!
are you serious? "wild protest" is about as ambiguous as you can get. There's no call for violence with the word "wild" any more than a "wild party" is a call for violence.
Regardless of what the media is labeling the events on January 6th, the people involved were acting of their own free will. Trump has no culpability for the actions of his supporters.
> if direct calls to violence and to insurrection against a democracy aren't grounds to take away your megaphone, then what is?
Are you suggesting that Trump made direct calls to violence and to insurrection? If so, that is patently false.
From Trump's actual Tweet on December 19th: "... Big Protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"
All he did was call upon his base of supporters to exert their first amendment right to assemble. To suggest this was anything more than that is pure confabulation.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night.
Even Bill Barr just came out
>Former Attorney General William Barr said Thursday that President Donald Trump inciting a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill the previous day was a "betrayal of his office and supporters."
As of 2:00 PM yesterday, the underlying context that several of his supporters are ready, willing, and able to commit sedition in his name is painfully obvious and to deny it would be willful ignorance. After all, they were in the act of committing it [1]. The statements that Trump made would almost unquestionably meet the Brandenburg v Ohio bar of incitement to "imminent lawless action" given that context, urging his supporters (some of whom, given the context, would be willing to commit a felony) to march to Congress to--I don't recall the exact wording--tell them what they think.
If Trump gave that speech this morning, with full knowledge of what transpired, you would have a strong case that he incited to "imminent lawless action." However, that key context isn't necessarily present yesterday morning when Trump actually gave his speech. You can make a case that a reasonable person should have known that a portion of the crowd would react in "imminent lawless action" (which would meet the bar). Likely, the courts would have judged that it's just "politicians saying things they don't mean" and dismissed it on the side of caution. However, the knowledge that imminent lawless action did occur as a result may persuade some people that a reasonable person really should have been able to predict this outcome, and thus that the speech actually meets the bar for incitement. It definitely is not a slam-dunk violation, but the fact that it isn't slam-dunk clear really should give you pause.
[1] 18 USC §2384 is the statutory definition of sedition. The mob yesterday meets all elements: "two or more persons" who "conspire[d]" to "by force" "delay the execution of any law of the United States." It isn't hyperbole to say that their act was sedition, it was literally sedition yesterday.
It's intellectually dishonest to say that he incited violence, especially when there's a heavily censored video of him explicitly instructing people to go home and to be peaceful [1].
> it tends to be the case that you can't suggest to people "You could try doing things differently" because that will be taken as blaming the victim
Sometimes it takes a friend (or stranger) to make such suggestions. Lonely and depressed people are typically trapped inside their heads, so they need some kind of external stimulus to help them understand that they are in control of their life. The truth sometimes hurts, but calling it victim blaming is nonsense.
I was talking about (online) support groups. It's a statement about a specific environment and it is based on enormous firsthand experience as the person usually being accused of victim blaming for the crime of trying to be helpful.
I’ve also found it incredibly difficult to help depressed/lonely people without experiencing some kind of backlash. I have a jobless friend who still lives with his parents, and is always lamenting about how terrible his life is, as if phishing for help. When I offer help, he becomes combative, so I try to just avoid the topic until one day he’s ready for change in his life.
Your friend is angry, and likely at himself, even if he won't admit it. I've been that way too, which is probably why this comment from Jean-Luc Picard (TNG: S04E12) struck a chord with me:
"I think when one has been angry for a very long time, one gets used to it. And it becomes comfortable, like old leather. And, finally, it becomes so familiar that one can't ever remember feeling any other way."
I have always struggled, in real life and online, with people who talk about their complex lives. This gives great advice for how to approach the situation with empathy for them and for the group. Thanks for posting this!
To add a perspective here:
Being offered help, especially in a way that says "why don't you do X?" can often provoke a reaction that tries to justify oneself. You want to feel validated in your self-pity, and if the solution to your struggles is as easy as "just doing X" all of your bad feelings are your own fault, too. That makes you feel even shittier.
So you need claim that it's impractical advice to evade that.
My best guess: Your friend is not looking for advice, they're looking for validation of their feelings when lamenting about their life.
But maybe this is a "what you want vs. what you need" situation.
I’ll add to this and say that people are mostly looking for validation when discussing problems, and that should always be your first response. If you feel you have valuable advice to give, ask them if they want it and make sure they’ll actually be receptive.
I've been at crossroads at several points in my life and realized that I was in too deep to trust my own decision making to be sound.
Getting on the internets and asking total strangers for their opinion helped me snap out of it. Even though I mostly didn't take their advice, being confronted with the aloof views of randos with no stake in my dilemma was what I needed to see the big picture beyond the walls that had already closed in on me.
In either of these situations，I'm certain a friend would have been either too compassionate or too afraid to appear immoral to give me the cold, hard truth.
Friendly reminder that reproducible F-Droid builds of Signal are still rejected for weak reasons [1]. You must trust the Signal binaries on popular app stores [2][3].
Don’t worry though; the Signal devs assure you that signed Android binaries from their website are reproducible [4]. As if checksum collisions aren’t something that state actors could trivially create [5].
Collision attacks are an issue when using md5/sha1, but I don't see how it's relevant in this case. If state actors wants to replace the signal apk with a backdoored one, they'll need to pull off a preimage attack, not a collision attack. A collision attack wouldn't be useful because you still need the original publisher to sign the apk for you, which seems unlikely considering OWS isn't a CA or anything. If OWS was compromised by state actors into signing, then they can just sign the backdoored version directly, no need for a collision attack.
I presume that the idea is that the compiled binary from the source and that the binary distributed by signal would be different but have the same sha1s. It does not make a lot of sense though because one could simply use another algorithm.
AFAIK, you cannot view applications on iOS unless your device is jailbroken. Apps are completely opaque since there is no traversable filesystem. On Android, it is a little simpler.
The vast majority of non-technical users have no knowledge about hexadecimal file comparisons or checksums. They see an app that promises privacy, and they click download.
You can download the APK from their site[1] and have been able to for several years, that's how I install it on my devices (and it does autoupdates).
As for hash collisions, as far as we know SHA256 hasn't been broken yet and even if it were broken you would need to be able to create a valid APK with Signal's code and the backdoor which hashes to the same thing as Signal.
Signal's reasons for not wanting to maintain an F-Droid repository are terrible, but that doesn't in any way compromise their security. As others have pointed out, reproducibility goes farther than just checksums.
From the pulseaudio developer (@pali) whose MR was blocked for 2 years:
“Hi all pulseaudio users! I'm really sorry that I have to do this thing but there is no other option. I'm really sorry.
I have to close this pull request because pulseaudio maintainers are bastards who decided to merge this pull request and later rework code to remove dependncy on codec libraries (which ensure proper audio quality) and replacing it by codecs provided by gstreamer which do not support neither SBC-XQ, aptX-HD nor FastStream. Both libsbc and libopenaptx libraries are required to have improved bluetooth codec quality.
Without them quality would stay low as it is without my patches. As pulseaudio maintainers stated in this and other discussion, including todays dicussion on IRC that they will do replacement, there is absolutely no reason to merge this pull request, which the only purpose is to improve bluetooth quality... as quality would be again decreased by usage of other unsuitable library.
Game is over. I'm closing this pull request now.
Blame namely @arun who from begining (see first comments) is working on decreasing quality by replacing codecs by gstreamer and @igor.v.kovalenko who today after IRC dicussion forced me to this thing and explained it by that linux distributions are not going to compile/whitelist libsbc and libopenaptx libraties like Ubuntu...
Good bye. It is pity that I have not do this thing year ago and I spent time on this, now useless project.
EDIT: Do not expect any bluetooth improvemnt in pulseaudio project. Maintainers are doing obstructions for 2 years to prevent merging this pull request in any form and rejected any other compromise or fixes which were proposed here in this pull request.
I get lot of emails from you "users" that you want better bluetooth audio quality. But I was not able to do anything for 2 years, you have to blame pulseaudio maintainers. Some of you sent me information that they are paid by either Red Hat or Microsoft/Apple to ensure that bluetooth quality would be catastrophic. I do not want to believe to these conspiration theories but reality is simple: Maintainers are doing everything to not improve quality -- either by blocking merging this pull request for 2 years (see that first version of patches were created prior gitlab existed and were only on mailing list) or forcing to use ffmpeg/gstreamer which does not support none of codecs in this pull request. And they do not want to change their mind or fundamentally did not understood this issue.
(PS: Reason for existance of LDAC, aptX and other proprietary codecs in bluetooth headsets is just because of poor implementation of SBC codec in systems)
So if you are asking, what to do: switch to other operating system. As you can see maintainers really do not want any improvement in Linux pulseaudio. I cannot help more
I would not reply to any other user comments, please send them to pulseaudio maintainers.“
Yea, I'm not really feeling all that sympathetic for pali here. A) calling the maintainers bastards is really not helping their case, B) the maintainers already clarified they weren't planning on reworking the code to reduce the audio quality.
If anything, I think this whole debacle illustrates the reality of big open source projects. It's largely thankless work a lot of the time.
Why was the previous post flagged? This website permits upload and download of publicly sourced data.
Edit: I think it was because the title of my previous post matched the name of the website. Per the Hacker News Guidelines: “If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.” Fixed!
Private entities are horrible at self-regulating. They are equally horrible at creating their own laws to selectively apply to users of their platform, in addition to laws of the location of the user.
This law effectively diminishes the ability of those private entities to enforce their own laws and terms of use. That sounds like a win for regular folks like me and you.
I don't expect my life will be improved by a brave new world of misinformation- if hacker news was unmoderated for example, there would be nothing on this site than a bunch of nazis high fiving each other all day, it would be worthless to normal people engaged in normal conversations and tech people wouldn't find it worth visiting.
Private entities don't have their own laws. They can't summon police to take you away or hand out fines you didn't contract to. Governments can.
If a government has the power to make private entities host user content they don't want then they have overall regulatory power and can go in the opposite direction as well. That's why government has no business regulating private entities for "freedom of speech". Unless you want the government to be your speech.
