Deniable encryption like that will be a lifesaver if things get bad enough. Though I’m thinking more the kind where the encrypted content on a computer disk is indistinguishable from free space, and you have multiple passwords that decrypt different parts of the filesystem. That way you can be interrogated and/or beaten, “give up” and unlock your computer (using the decoy password), and still hide any incriminating evidence since those files remain hidden with no way for adversaries to even detect that they exist.

Nothing.

My cat is asleep on my lap. I am now trapped for all eternity.

Is this close enough?

If they didn’t want players to do this, they wouldn’t have included a drum magazine upgrade for the assault rifle.

This is how I’ve always felt about it too. All of Whedon’s other shows had twists that made the audience hate entire seasons; there’s no reason to believe Firefly would have escaped that pattern.

So instead of being sad it died early, we can be glad we can still imagine where it could have gone in the best case scenario. The vision in our minds will likely be better than what we would have got if it’d continued.

No need to worry about Jayne’s inevitable face-heel turn, or whatever other terrible subplots could potentially have cropped up in later seasons like River developing explicit (rather than merely suggested) incestuous feelings for Simon, or Inara betraying the crew for a cure to her disease (before being welcomed back a season later), or Kaylee getting killed off out of nowhere because Whedon loves doing that to characters of her archetype, or YoSaffBridge becoming a core crew member after we learn her tragic backstory even though her awful personality hasn’t changed at all.

And that’s not even getting into what the network execs, who hated the show, would have done with their meddling. Things could have been so much worse. Fans should console themselves with the fact that the show at least died with its dignity intact, and we even got a movie that resolved a few of the major hanging threads.

No one talks about famous actor James Dean becoming an ultraconservative asshole, being closeted racist, or a serial abuser of women. He died before anything like that could happen. Firefly is the same way.

Something like this would have happened even if Joss Whedon wasn’t revealed to be a scumbag. Adam Baldwin, the actor who played Jayne, went on to become a major mouthpiece for the alt-right and a mainstay of conservative Twitter. IIRC he’s even the one who named GamerGate (not that the name required even a modicum of creativity).

I do!

I mean, I have a friend, and they have two other friends, so therefore I have three friends… right?

ChatGPT

Cybersecurity

So you know how to fix all the security holes the AI left in your codebase, right? Right?

I remember reading sketchy guides on how to add custom ringtones without needing to pay for the privilege. Arbitrary restrictions on user folder access predate Android.

Once a week? Those things could go pretty much forever on a single charge so long as you weren’t making calls, even with batteries that had a tiny fraction of modern capacity due to their simple hardware.

Nowadays even a completely idle smartphone on extreme power saving mode is lucky to last a couple of days, especially if you don’t/can’t disable the vendor-mandated bloatware that periodically wakes it up to phone home. When used regularly, it’s not uncommon for a phone to drain within a single day.

Sometimes I miss the simple, rugged designs - right up until I remember how much better smartphones are at literally everything else. Still wish companies would get the memo and focus on bigger batteries rather than smaller phones, though.

With a full party of casters? One hour IC, a couple years OOC.

I’m right there with you. They’re basically saying “things could be worse, so there’s no point in wanting them better.” It’s a nonsensical thought-terminating cliché.

They’re taking the opposite approach.

In the past families had a bunch of kids because they needed extra laborers to stay afloat, plus childhood mortality rates were so dire they needed spares to cover for the ones who wouldn’t make it.

We’re already seeing pushes towards removing child labor laws, and RFK Jr is well on his way to ensuring death from easily preventable diseases makes a comeback.

You just wait. Come Vatican III, my homeopathic infini-wine will be an accepted, nay, mandated part of Catholic mass. They’re always saying to be more like Jesus, and what’s more Jes-ish than duplicating food to feed the masses?

At least it’s better than motherfuckee?

And are they considered bread or meat? Or both, allowing for the world’s most compact and efficient sandwich?

“The Sacrament of the Eucharist is the body and blood of Christ really present under the appearances of bread and wine; if the appearances cease to be present, then the sacrament no longer exists, and so the Real Presence ceases.”

“The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ.”

Hold on, I figured out a trick for infinite communion wine. Just water it down but occasionally add some Red 40 so it still looks the same. It’s theologically sound!

the motherfucker

He prefers “Dad”.

I dunno, but dangle a firework in it and you’ve got yourself a hell of a party popper.

Ideas for the inevitable Homeward Bound reboot.

There are entire sites dedicated to “Rationalism”. It’s a quasi-cult of pseudointellectual wankery that’s mostly a bunch of sub-cults of personalities based around the worst people you’ll ever meet. A lot of tech bros bought into it because for whatever terrible thing they want to do, some Rationalist has probably already written a thirty page manifesto on why it’s actually a net good and moral act and preemptively kissing the boot of whoever is “brave” enough to do it.

The movement’s founder and “leader” is a highschool dropout and self-declared genius who is mainly famous for writing a “deconstructive” Harry Potter fanfiction despite never reading the books himself; a work that’s more preachy than Atlas Shrugged at its worst and mostly consists of regurgitated content from his blog and ripoffs of Ender’s Game alongside freshmen-level (and often wrong) understandings of basic science.

He also has this weird hard-on about true AI inevitably escaping the lab by somehow convincing researchers to free it through pure, impeccable logic.

Re: that last point: I first heard of Elizier Yudkowsky nearly twenty years ago, long before he wrote Methods of Rationality (the aforementioned fanfiction). He was offering a challenge on his personal site where he’d roleplay as an AI that had gained sentience and you as its owner/gatekeeper, and he bet he could convince you to let him connect to the wider internet and free himself using nothing but rational arguments. He bragged about how he’d never failed and that this was proof that an AI escaping the lab was inevitable.

It later turned out he’d set a bunch of artificial limitations on debaters and what counterarguments they could use and made them sign an NDA before he’d debate them. He claimed that this was so future challengers couldn’t “cheat” by knowing his arguments ahead of time (because as we all know, “perfect logical arguments” are the sort that fall apart when given enough time to think about them /s).

It shouldn’t come as a shock that it was eventually revealed he’d lost multiple of these debates even with those restrictions, declared that those losses “didn’t count”, and forbid the other person from talking about them using the NDA they’d signed so he could keep bragging about his perfect win rate.

Anyway, I was in no way surprised when he used his popularity as a fanfiction writer to establish a cult around himself. There’s an entire community dedicated to following and mocking him and his proteges if you’re interested - IIRC it’s !techtakes@awful.systems !sneerclub@awful.systems.