am I the only one who would advocate for text only storage: no. This comment also gets my point? There should be text only lemmy instances which only save text and do not allow any kind of image posting or storage.

• text is less offensive to consume and moderate than evil images or video
• text is way more information dense and can be even compressed more! Truly the green biosphere friendly data format. I would be willing to save text only data of strangers on my hard-drive, but not images or video. Could even be valuable llm analysis training data.

Yes people could post base64 encoded images, but that is a larger technical barrier and can be detected. If image storage is really need, images should be heavily compressed (webp 90% quality loss), provided as links to external sites, and whenever possible svg / vector graphics should be preferred.

Wow, I did not know about Operation Epsilon. Thanks.

no! Have we already reached peak lemmy?

Rome defeated their greatest rival Carthago in their formative years. Hannibal, a general of Carthago, tried to cross the Alps with elephants and made a surprise attack on the roman heartland 🐘🏔️. But it failed.

tldr: Pagan Mongol tribes

I theorize: Nomadic mongol tribes (horsemen who used bow and arrow to hunt 🏇🏹) converted quite quickly to the religion of the people they conquered. But the Mongols where mostly pagan shamanistic tribes in the beginning (they believed in the Sky god Tengri) and transferred some of their culture into ruling elites of their subject countries and killed many monotheistic farmers people greatly altering east asian and central asian demographics at a scale of 40.000.000 people 💀. Also the Mongol conquests acted as a buffer that kept Islam or Orthodox Christianity spreading beyond central asia into east asia for 500 years:

• Mongol tribes captured Moscow and beyond, preventing orthodox Christianity to expand to China faster
• Mongol empire captured the Chinese capital Beijing. Maybe their shamanistic believes influenced locals.
• Timurid (emperor Timur was grandson of Mongol Ghengis Khan) empire only expanded west not to China by their luck. They defeated mostly muslim empires like Persians and Ottomans. This prevented larger muslim expansion into east Asia. Even Europeans viewed the muslim timurids as a great threat, but also as a ally against Persian and Ottoman empires.
• The siege of Baghdad in the year 1258 by the Mongol empire with Chinese siege-craft destroyed the Muslim “golden age” destroying a chance of their expansion to east asia

Additional theory: Shamanistic Mongol tribe invasions might have deeply altered the subconscious of the religious people they annexed in central Asia/Eastern russia and Persia, what is known that they replaced the ruling elites and subtly influenced hierarchy to make taxation easier.

Don’t the Scottish men wear short skirts? But they seem rather the exception than the rule. Maybe the native Americans also wore skirts of some kind, or sometimes nothing at all.

2010s: xml

<xml>
   <a href="oh no">
</xml>

Yep I agree now the analysis is wrong on the extrovert/introvert part and it is totally uncorrelated. Many “business types” who love the Elons, Peter Thiels, or Viveks out there seem management types who want short term stock prices to go up, by any means needed.

Also I would not describe Donald Trump or Steve Banon as introverts.

Yep many people left twitter and did not return. Basically they are silent now.

okay. So please. Stop using X. Use Mastodon or other Fediverse alternatives, even if your reach is smaller there?

Unpopular Opinion: Trump represents a demographic transition in the U.S. as the old people go into retirement new young people emerge. The retiring and now dying people had the following properties:

• did not use social media, reads popular newspapers
• extrovert, wanted to dominate international institutions and create new international rules
• pro free markets, wanted to achieve global systems dominance, containment of enemies (Soviet Union)
• unionized working class (example: Boeing employee)
• majority Protestant, Catholic or Mormon

Meanwhile Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and other Silicon Valley emperors captured a new demographic:

• uses social media, isolated in select bubbles
• introvert, isolationist
• pro tariffs, local markets, walls as a symbolic and total solution to societies openness, what I would describe as “self containment protectionism”
• not in a union, does not even dream of a union. (example: Fruit picker in Florida/Texas)
• Catholic, majority is atheist now

This might represent the final shift away from the old cold war era to a new war(?) era. To my understanding South America is majority introvert conservative catholic in its foreign policy and North america is (was) majority extrovert unionized protestant in its foreign policy. And now North America starts to look more like an isolationist version of Argentinia or Brazil to me with heavy protestant tones (think of Milei of Argentinia or Bolsonaro of Brazil, who are ironically more protestant than catholic in their support base). I am not american so proudly correct me where I am totally wrong in my analysis.

Didnt the Vikings use birch tar to make their wooden ships watertight? Awesome tree!

I guess the fastest growing tree in my region is spruce 🌲.

Whatever tree grows fastest in my region 🌳🌳.

• they provide shade after 10 years
• fast growth removes CO2 from the air
• block vision
• root system stabilizes ground
• wood can be sold after 30 years, replant

First: Mass Surveillance is possible without computing technology. The Stasi secret police in the DDR or secret police of the Soviet Union and North Korea demonstrate this. Normal citizens where secret spies that reported their family members or “friends” activity. In your wording of your text I notice you are mostly concerned with computational surveillance with modern technology, why not expand this to other human based surveillance systems?

Now to the computing aspects: Standardization Whatever is possible with technology will be implemented by someone, even if it was meant as a temporary test it might become permanent apparatus for surveillance. A good example of that is the http protocol which through its faulty design allows some surveillance: cookies, user-Agent headers, IP-Addresses, Domain name systems. Someone in the surveilance agency of China understood http stack and its vulnerabilities, otherwise there would be no great chinese firewall that can block all foreign traffic 🏰🏯🏰.

No one wants to go away from http, eventhough it enables chinese mass surveillance, because it became a convenient standard. This is why it became permanent, even though more private systems are possible (onion/i2p sites), very few use them. Lazy Convenience > Privacy.

All communication will yield metadata.

Tldr:

Knowledge is power.

Human organizations: It is free real estate.

I am the Senate now!

~ Chancelor Palpetine