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Currency of Distrust
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Christian | Husband | Father Professional hacker Lover of freedom tech

Every now and again I like to watch The Big Short to remind myself just how fucked up the GFC was.

My family was severely affected by the crash and I graduated high school in 2008. Going into the world at that time was so hard and I had to work my ass off to get established.

I really feel for kids entering the world after Covid. Fiat is such unbelievable cancer.

I wonder if there’s a way to bring nostr, podcasts, and torrenting together in an interesting way to create uncensorable content that’s also highly resilient to being lost to history.

lol I lived in Texas then PNW and this is true. My favorite thing in summer is to lay in the sun on the grass

The thing I hate most about Amazon is what it’s done to local retail stores. I’ve had so many times in the last few months where I go to get a very basic thing from a store, but they no longer stock these items.

Store shelves are almost never full anymore and the quality/quantity is nowhere near what it used to be.

Don’t worry, my Bitaxe is on the way!

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Memes are winning!

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What’s a good movie to watch with a nice glass of whiskey? I got one of those whiskey smokers and gonna try it tonight 😀

There definitely have been some fires but ya, not massive ones like California. I’m very ignorant on forest management stuff, I grew up in the desert 🤣

I switched to PopOS full time a few months ago and I love that I’m in full control. Cant believe I ran the shitcoin that is windows for so long. Even macOS isn’t as good as it used to be.

I’ve worked in #SaaS for a few years now. Here’s the standard VC backed SaaS playbook:

- Get seed funding, build MVP, get a few customers

- Get Series A and find product market fit

- Series B on forward - burn all the cash you have to acquire as much market share as possible.

- Once you have a strong percentage of the market, start raising prices rapidly to become profitable

- Big public exit to appease VCs, investors, employees…

This leaves customers paying a huge amount than they originally did and always spurs conversations about whether they really need this thing or not.

The big #AI players are clearly targeting corporations with the pitch of “you won’t need employees”. But there’s a problem - AI doesn’t have the same economics of typical software.

If they start charging what it actually costs to run these models, the cost savings suddenly aren’t so immense. If we end up in a world where corporations are running AI bots 24/7, it’s not unlikely that they quickly become too expensive vs traditional employees. And this isn’t even accounting for whether the AI actually performs these tasks well enough.

Unless the AI companies can create huge amounts of energy to offset their costs, I can see this happening. Maybe they figure out how to do this, but if adoption goes through the roof, it’s going to take a tremendous amount of new energy production.

Humans are the undefeated champions of turning organic matter into energy and production efficiently!

I have wondered more than once if this leads to the end of the internet as we know it. No one will know who or what is real. Authenticity in scarce supply.

Replying to Avatar L0la L33tz

I want to talk about something that some people may find offensive, and that I can’t talk about on Twitter to not get shadow banned as I have to rely on reach for my work.

The first time I attended Chaos Computer Congress was over 15 years ago. It had the best parties in town, and we would sneak in for the nightlife.

As I rekindled my interest in politics, computers and the internet, I became more aligned with the CCC’s mission: hacking the planet to hold power to account.

While I was already disappointed with some of the CCC’s policies – particularly on things like COVID and Bitcoin – this year was the first time that I seriously lost hope for and trust in the CCC as an institution – starting with its opening speech.

The CCC’s opening speech sets the theme for the event. This year, it was dedicated to the global rise of fascism. Speakers talked about Germany’s protests against the far-right AFD, about Donald Trump, LGBTQ and abortions, and pro-democracy protests in countries like Georgia.

But not a single word was lost to the genocide in Palestine.

Checking the CCC’s schedule, I merely found a single talk on Palestine, which explicitly made clear that it did not take a stance on whether Israel was right or wrong in its operations.

There were still a lot of great talks at the congress, and many assemblies showed their solidarity, but this complete lack of mention is what really stood out for me.

To understand what a hackers congress has to do with genocide, we need to take an uncomfortable look at Nazi Germany.

What enabled the Holocaust 80 years ago was not just a bunch of bloodthirsty eugenicist maniacs high on ungodly amounts of speed and their fascist ideologies. It was the streamlining of exploitation and murder to never before seen efficiency, with the help of new, more efficient technologies.

It is these same advancements in technology that are fueling the genocide in Palestine today. It’s surveillance on an unprecedented scale, evermore invasive spyware, AI enabled targeting and automated drone warfare.

You can think of Palestine what you want, but this technology is being exported from Palestine to the rest of the world today.

It’s facial recognition systems and license plate scanners that Israel uses to enforce apartheid that you’ll soon see scanning your biometrics for your next flight on holidays, or your car on your next trip to work.

It’s spyware companies that test their products to soon sell them to governments around the world targeting activists, journalists and opposition.

It’s psychological warfare utilizing dating sites like Grindr to social engineer Palestinians into spying on their peers and extort their sexual preferences.

Just last month, the a16z portfolio company Skydio, which is a major Israeli military contractor, was caught providing its surveillance drones to Yale University to monitor and track student protestors.

Some of you may find this topic uncomfortable as it may not align with your political views.

But the reality remains that the genocide in Palestine is a testing ground for never before seen surveillance tech that will soon be used on you. And the world’s most renowned hackers are silent.

A huge part of why I got into cybersecurity to start with was because of Anonymous. I was just getting into the workforce when they were going strong and wreaking havoc among the elites.

I loved the spirit of their actions, which was to hold power to account.

It’s not a surprise that three letter agencies cracked down HARD on that activity and essentially neutered the real hacker culture. The one where authority wasn’t legitimate and freedom and privacy were paramount.

Out of all the software engineers in the world, how many are writing code for products that normal people use and it actually improves their life?

I bet it’s under 10%. Maybe even 5%.

The majority of SWE’s are working at companies who’s sole focus is selling to other corporations. The rest are making fake AI profiles for FB/IG 🤣