crypt0wl @11110110010@computerfairi.es

Spent most of my spare time last week reading old #intelligence reports by the HVA, the foreign intelligence service of the #gdr.

I've got to say, I wonder how novelists made this stuff sound thrilling. It's a perpetuating cycle of people being drunk, fucking up, fucking each other.

I've yet to do a deeper dive on the MfS, but I'd be surprised if it were any different.

Not going to lie, trying to implement an encoding-scheme on my own, without relying on the methods #Python provides, has been an eye-opener.

In theory, Base64 is simple - take input, convert to funny numbers, compare to character table, return output.

But what about whitespace? What about non-ASCII characters? What about padding?There's so many not-even-edge cases.

Every time I open up my instance of yarr, I get hyped for #rss again. How cool is it that you get to curate your own firehose of news, articles and videos without some algorithm deciding what's interesting to you?

I don't really understand personal development budgets. Thousands of dollars for a week-long course of questionable benefit? Absolutely.

300 bucks for a couple of books that I'm willing to study and work through in my personal time? Nah.

I could install Calibre to convert an EPUB to another format. Or I could install 6GB of Texlive-dependencies to achieve the same effect.

I'm obviously going for the latter.

Similar events are happening in #brazil - #bolsonaro claimed that the elections were stolen, skipped the inauguration of Da Silva, and conveniently was out of the country when events that were eerily similar to January 6th unfolded.

I don't have a solution, or even an idea how to deal with this problem. But it's important to pay attention to these things. All of the aforementioned are not acting in good faith. They don't care about democracy. But we should. (4/4)

The Republican party seems to be aiming at slowly eroding democracy as a whole, as can be seen with the election of Kevin McCarthy.

It took 15 ballots for him to be elected (btw, it has been exactly 100 years since the last time an election needed more than 1 ballot), with the extreme parts of the Republican party sabotaging the vote. And this will continue. (3/x)

Trump claimed that the election was stolen, made sure to question everything and everyone in the electoral process that wasn't working in his favor and then proceeded to attack everything that he questioned and more.

Those attacks weren't only political, they were literal, as the January 6th 2021 has shown. And the attacks haven't ceased, they are continuing and have expanded. 2/x

I don't know very much about #usa #politics, but I know a little bit about disinformation works - specifically, how targeted attacks against democratic opponents or democracy itself usually go:

* Publicly claim that the election has been stolen by your political enemy.
* Question the electoral process as a whole.
* Attack democratic institutions, both organizations and processes.

Sounds familiar? That's because this is exactly what is happening in the United States. 1/x