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Cake day: October 26th, 2025

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  • You know something? If a group of individuals stood in solidarity, claimed responsibility to enforce moral law, and fought to arrest Trump under their own self-proclaimed authority… I wouldn’t even be mad. In the past, people would have said “let the rule of law work it out.” At this point, however, the authority of a militia would not be too far off from the authority of Trump. Trump takes the situation into his own hands (those tiny little hands), with self-proclaimed Presidential powers up and beyond that of even Unitary Executive Theory. Something to contest that authority with its own would be welcomed in my book.







  • It’s a freaky thing to consider if you believe in some divine nature like the soul, or if you believe that you’re a conscious agent independent of your environment. With these beliefs, you position yourself as an “observer” of the universe… such a position costs you observability of the contextual processes which led to your being.

    What if, instead, you’re a giant mount of cells that evolved to interact with your environment? What if your self is more of a relationship with nature than it is a static identity? From this angle, we should expect that we’re fighting an uphill battle when we want to learn about the nature of being in this universe. Most likely, we can not perceive of things which we had no necessity to perceive at any point in our ancestral lineage.

    Dark matter is spooky, but only because we are beings of spookiness. We decide what is spooky and project that experience into the empirical reality of our dwelling.


  • Today we casually say “100 °C at 1 atm,” but in Fahrenheit’s time, controlling or even measuring atmospheric pressure was hard. Boiling water on different days could still get different temperatures because the air pressure was different that day or at that location. They also only had alcohol-based thermometers, maybe some early mercury ones… it wasn’t easy to measure reliably.

    Boiling point drops ~0.5 °C per 150 meters of elevation, or something to that effect. It was unreliable for big science when the goal is lab-friendly anchor points.


  • Personally, I would express explicitly that I am participating in the general strike. I might say something like one of this:


    Good morning [Boss’s Name],

    I wanted to let you know that I will be unavailable on Friday, January 30, as I will be participating in a nationally organized general strike taking place that day.

    This decision is personally and morally motivated and is not intended as a statement toward you, my colleagues, or the company. I remain committed to my role and responsibilities, and I will be fully available again on the next working day.

    Please let me know if there is anything I should prepare or hand off in advance to ensure continuity.

    Thank you,


    Edit: A more subtle version without the explicit link to the strike, if you so wish.


    Good morning [Boss’s Name],

    I wanted to let you know that I will be unavailable on Friday, January 30.

    I’ll ensure that any responsibilities are covered or handed off in advance, and I’ll be fully available again on the next working day. Please let me know if you need anything from me beforehand.

    Thank you,


    I like being explicit because it gives an opportunity for others to choose to join if they didn’t know about it or weren’t taking it so seriously beforehand. I try to avoid leaving the door open for their political opinions of the strike by simply not sharing my own. I state I won’t be at work, why I won’t be at work, and that is all. Not that I think it’s the right thing to do, nor that I think it’s important in any way… just that I’ll be there, not here.

    If they start voicing opinions about the strike being pointless, or anything of the sort, I’ll express simply: “thanks for your perspective on the matter, but I would prefer to keep the conversation free of political bias because you never know who you might be listening and how they might feel. I just wanted to make sure you’re aware of my plans, and that it does not reflect my feelings toward you or the company in any way. Have a good day.”


    Edit: fixed Thursday to Friday.





  • It’s not End to End and The guy in the Middle. The message is encrypted from one end to the other. The detail about who has a copy of the key doesn’t spoil that fact, and I guarantee you Meta doesn’t care about using E2EE as a marketing term even if it misrepresents their actual product by matter of status quo. What matters is what they can theoretically argue in a court room.

    A proper solution would be to have an open standard that specially calls out these details, along with certifications issued by trusted third parties.


  • Yeah. E2EE isn’t a single open standard. It’s a general security concept / practice. There’s no way to argue that they don’t really have E2EE if in fact they do, but they keep a copy of the encryption key for themselves. Also, the workers client app can simply have the “decrypt step” done transparently. Or, a decrypted copy of the messages could be stored in a cache that the client app uses… who knows? E2EE being present or not isn’t really the main story here. It’s Meta’s obvious deceitful-ness by leveraging the implicit beliefs about E2EE held by us common folk.