There’s this post of mine, also this article gives some background on the application of PIR to anonymous messaging. Basically, I’m trying to do a basic version of that, but using a state-of-the-art PIR protocol introduced in this article. It’s still not great performance-wise, but it’s enough to be practical (as stated, many thousands of users given enough resources).

No, sorry, I haven’t uploaded anything yet, I’ve only coded the protocols and some benchmark code. The idea is for each client to send and receive data continuously. Since text messages are pretty small and YPIR+SP doesn’t have a lot of overhead, that could be a reasonable way to conceal all metadata, as long as there are not enough people connected to overwhelm the server.

Sorry! I meant Private Information Retrieval, that could allow metadata-hiding messaging.

Depends a lot on where you live. In many countries, communism is simply considered “radical/violent” rather than “authoritarian”, and one is not considered a leftist of any sort unless they defend a leftist stance on the economy (progressive views on social issues may not be described as leftist everywhere).

My bad, the downvotes got me confused.

Many people are targeted around the world for their beliefs. That includes activists, journalists and other people who “haven’t done anything wrong”.

I guess we could make one using newer FHE-RAM techniques and some edge case handling.

Western companies outsource much of their production to countries with cheaper labor, so the really important things here are cheap raw materials and state subsidies. Since the Chinese state owns many of the large companies there, they can reduce profits throughout the supply chain or move them to other companies in the form of these subsidies. As well as use that money to build transport and green energy infrastructure, further lowering manufacturing costs.

Investors always seek short-term profit, so playing the long game is something you need aggressive policies for.

When returning from kernel code, one should issue Drop Execution Ring Privileges, of course.

The benefits of a free market have been discussed by communists in the past, and newer experiments like the reforms implemented by China make it clear that socialism is compatible with a free market, to very good results.

Thanks for engaging with OP in a civil fashion, especially when you felt attacked… Anyway, hmu if you want to discuss this in more depth.

Fake article

The private sector is ceasing to be China’s primary driver of growth, with that role year after year being further taken up by the state. Diminishing private funding is obviously not good, but it does align with their goal of reaching socialism by 2050. We’ll see how their economy does from now on…

Rule 34/34

Relevant context

Very cool context, thx!

Printing money is just one way that inflation can appear. The latest trends in that respect are in fact not caused by money-printing.

Well, to be fair there are indeed enough houses… We kinda just assumed they would, by the grace of the market, end up distributed among virtually all people and at a fair price. The reason they never did and increasingly don’t is one of the largest unsolved problems in economics /s

The article gives me bad vibes… On the one hand, it (and linked articles) seems to present the implicit assumption that Israel = Zionism = Judaism, which is very clearly false but could be easily used to used to “prove” other statements, like this: “Israel = Judaism -> Criticism of Israel = Criticism of Judaism = antisemitism”. Same logic can be used for “anti-Zionism = antisemitism”.

Additionally, the article does not mention any criticism of Israel that would not be considered disinformation, leaving that question open. This, of course, is dangerous, as it leaves open the possibility that people who “only care about truth” (but do not unconditionally support Israel) support restrictive measures on X as suggested by the article while those measures are then effectively meant to silence criticism of Israel.

Finally, one linked article seems to support the idea that all footage from the warzone should be fact-checked before being published. While this would curb some (minority) false footage, it would dramatically reduce the exposure that the conflict can get, as well as potentially exposing its spread to censorship from many sources.

So, overall, I think this article is using a reasonable-sounding rhetoric to push forward centralized control of social media narratives. It’s not a problem that some information on the platform is false, but if the overall narrative is biased, that would really become a problem, and X already implemented community notes (which use a really innovative de-biasing algorithm) to fight that. I can only conclude that we should resist the call to introduce potential sources of systematic bias to counter ultimately “inoffensive” random bias, which would be a step towards true authoritarianism.

Palestine has attacked territory that was assigned to Palestine by the UN in 1947. The UN also makes it very clear that a country may lawfully recover occupied territory “by any means, including armed force”. UN laws are thus very clear: Ukraine and Palestine can recover territories by force. Now, that doesn’t mean you should support them in their struggle to do so, but if you don’t, it must be for some other reason (e.g., Israel taking over would constitute a huge strategic gain for the US, while Russia taking over would destabilize the world and thus benefit small or weakly aligned players).

Haha yeah, it did take 2-3 days for me to get up to speed with it, it does not work like a typical keyboard at all.