It’s also the fact that the measures taken are very reminiscent of that one phrase about locks: they keep the honest people away.

I have serious doubts that an hacker group, government-sponsored or not, would be using corporate, easily-traceable emails, like the removed maintainers did.

Seeing governments tackle tech in general is very weird. Sometimes I wonder if they feel the same way when making this kind of decisions or actually never feel a little odd about them.

Reeks of the chat history access attempts and the like, or is it just my paranoia?

That’s a direct pipeline, it seems. Goes straight to the EU.

There’s a different pipeline (maybe several, not sure) going through Ukraine.

Not sure what lists you’re talking about, but it’s nerding time anyway.

The backslash (the \ symbol) is used to “escape” characters in the software world, i.e. tell the software to treat the following character as a simple symbol, not some instruction. It’s very well-known among developers, so if they happen to be the ones writing guides on Markdown (the syntax where you use asterisks and some other symbols to dictate the final layout while having the luxury of being able to edit the document in a plain-text editor), it can actually elude them because it’s mundane.

In fact, some software won’t allow you to use the backslash in short text fields such as names or passwords because doing so could potentially open up security risks where the malicious actors “inject” some instructions into software to cause all sorts of trouble. On the other hand, this is probably a redundant old measure, as there are usually other means to prevent this kind of attack today, but that’s the power of habit, I guess; and, well, if it’s a simple measure that works, there’s not much reason to get rid of it, is there?

Obligatory fuck AI and the illeterate bros pushing it.

What kind of videos, though? A lot of such material is very far from being proper educational material that we show other people to really teach them much, let alone educate them well enough to be anywhere trustworthy. This is a very processed material, with years of preparation once you consider the prior education of the individuals involved in the creative process - think of the past experiences silently influencing them, their initial knowledge on the subject obtained from somewhat basic facts from school or otherwise, their misconceptions, iterations that nobody knows about, and many other things that we don’t usually directly associate with the act of working on something like a video, but that eventually do dictate a lot of the decisions and opinions put into it.

It’s one thing that the AI has no intelligence in it whatsoever, but the fact that it’s being pumped with information and “knowledge” in basically the reverse order doesn’t help it become any better.

On the other hand, the entire thing is not about making something that works well, but something that sells well. And then there’s people putting too much faith into the thing and trusting it with way too much stuff than they should (which is also the case with a lot of other tech, though, admittedly).

Some things of today are so damn unexciting.

We’re very proficient at walking, but somehow haven’t produced a walking home or anything like that.

It’s not very linear.

Happy to help!

A gentle nudge towards, let’s say, alternative means of acquiring media to enjoy. One that, ironically enough, Neil Gaiman commended himself (under certain circumstances, of course). One that is still better than giving money to someone you don’t want to support as a person or a creator.