Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I liked that about the comic.

Our society has adopted this expectation that once a relationship has turned into love, it must remain that, and if its not eternal soul mates in total devotion, it’s not true love. You’re not allowed to dial it down, take a break from it or return to being friends, or it’s a “failed” relationship.

The message of the comic subverts this, showing that without such baggage, you could just change the relationship to something else and still be happy.

Instead, we assume from the beginning that the relationship is forever, throw our households together, and when the point would be right to return to normal friendship, we force ourselves to stick close until we can’t stand each other anymore.

I’m the weird one in the room. I’ve been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in “best” mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

Yes, I do that on all my VMs about every 3-5 weeks when it turns itself on again.

I love the “Let’s finish setting up your device” popup that prevents me from using my VMs regularly.

Like some condescending peddler trying to slam-dunk your agreement as a foregone conclusion.

Come on, buddy, let’s do those remaining tasks, let’s have Microsoft scan your face, tell Microsoft about your phone, let’s go and install those Microsoft apps missing from your phone, and your laptop, too, and then we go buy that Office subscription and have you store your important files on Microsoft’s servers and we really need to get around to switching to Microsoft’s web browser now.

And the only option you get is “Yes” or “Remind me later.”

If you turn it off (and it needs to be turned off in two places), it’ll be back on as soon as Microsoft publishes the tiniest update to any of its unwanted services. Harrghrrr! (artery popping noises)

…and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they’ll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.

That has been Russia’s game for more than a decade now: stoke existing tensions. Brexit, political polarization in the USA and internal division in nearly all European countries.

Bringing the already uneasy situation between Israel/Palestine to a boiling point in order to distract from Russia’s war in Ukraine is not a big stretch.