The short version is throughout my life I've seemed to be unable to execute sustained action towards any kind of meaningful forward momentum. I know very well all the things I need to be doing, but in that precious moment called the present things always seem to slip. I can't gain traction. All reagent and no catalyst.

It goes without saying that the irony isn't lost on me of asking for advice, more information, more data, when what's really needed is action, but I simply don't know what else to do.

The details;

I think by far my biggest character flaw so to speak is a lack of an ability to execute under normal circumstances. Obviously procrastination and other related behaviours plague most people to one degree or another but I think in my case it's at a point where it presents an arguably existential risk to any kind of real future.

I'm in my late twenties working a relatively low paying job with moderate technical skill. Like many other children in the 1990s I was diagnosed with ADHD and medicated, though with little to no success. I stopped in my late teens but have recently begun to experiment anew consulting with my family doctor. I've since failed to renew my latest prescription but I think there's some small potential there. That said I think the buik of the change will still have to come from within.

I'm reticent to frame my experience within the pathology of a medical condition and would prefer to describe my experience without the artifacts and assumptions I feel would otherwise flatten the anecdotes. For years now I've been meaning to study when I get home from work, go to the gym (hell, just get a subscription), eat healthier, etc. There's a burnt out light in my kitchen I've been wanting to change for the past 3 weeks and haven't gotten around to. Everything slips. If I remember I need to do something I'm walking to the grocery store, or on the bus to work, or at a friend's house. I've been meaning to return a friend's call for over a month. Again, everything slips.

I feel like I'm at a point where I really need discipline and this scares me. I dropped out of college 10 years ago, live alone and work full time. I have no academic backing to speak of and feel this severely limits my future prospects as far as both lucrative, enjoyable and fruitful future employment goes. They say that when trying to plot future human behaviour the best predictor by far is past behaviour; so I'm at a point where personal success is probably unlikely, so I'd also be content being in a position where I can positively impact the lives of others. I feel all else aside this should even be a priority; I need not necessarily find success or happiness if I can be some part of the catalyst for a multitude of people to find it. Net positive for the cosmos and all that.

I've got a relatively strong foundation of knowledge for doing IT work, having administered a handful of Linux desktops and servers for personal use for the past 5 years (with previous albeit inconsistent dabbling prior to that). I generally believe in open source software and try to use it wherever I can. Unless something Very Bad happens computers are going to be a huge part of the human experience moving forward and if we are to truly prosper for the coming millennia it's probably best if this part of humanity wasn't closed off in boxes held by duopolies with the power to rival governments.

In regard to IT work I also want to stress that I'm not kidding myself either, there would still be a lot of work to do in terms of certifications, an exponential increase in experience, etc. Dunning–Kruger looms its head here I think. Also, though it's probably my best asset to convert into a career I'm not sure I like the culture that surrounds IT at least as far as I imagine it, and I don't have a particular fascination with things like networking or server administration which has me a bit worried. For what it's worth I'd say my true passion lies in the Sciences, namely Astronomy. Fusion seems to be the main attraction in the Universe so I like to pay attention. Words fail me a bit here but suffice to say the latter is the only subject which I feel truly fascinates me.

The world isn't lack for the musings and moans of uncomfortable souls, and this turned out much more long-winded than I intended it to. I can't imagine anyone reading this to derive much value here so I'll cut it short.

If you've made it this far and have any kind of feedback I'd appreciate hearing it.

Cheers,

I suggest using AniChart to see what's airing with solid sorting and filtering options, if you aren't already into seasonal anime or just want to see what's going on!

With the obvious most anticipated series of the season airing its first episode just recently, Summer 2018 is in full swing even by conservative estimates. What have you seen and what have you picked up or dropped so far? If you're waiting to hop on board, what looks interesting to you this season? Let's hear some thoughts :)

We're obviously being denied the benefits of so called advances in algorithmic search, as evidenced by the poor showing of Google Itself in unusual searches. For example, if you search images for "runners wearing green hats -shamrock -st. -patrick" Guess how many runners wearing green hats you get?

So search is hard? I think it's more likely that Google and everyone else is more interested in selling you a hat than helping you find a picture of a runner in a green hat.

I apologize in advance for what's probably going to be a very rambly post. This has been stewing on my mind for a while now and I just need to get it out.

I've been on reddit a long time, 11 years as of today in fact. In that time, I've watched the site grow from a small community of mostly tech nerds to one of the biggest sites on the web. I've also moderated many communities, from small niche subs (/r/thecure, /r/makeupaddictioncanada) to some of the biggest subs on the site (/r/worldnews, /r/gaming). I've modded communities that have exploded in popularity, growing from 25k to 100k to 500k and beyond, and seen how those communities change.

When you're in a subreddit of say, 10k users, there's more community engagement. You know the users, the users know the mods, and you know when people are engaging in good faith. The mods themselves are basically just another user with a bit more control. People coming in just to cause shit are generally downvoted to death and reported quickly, and taken care of - it's a community effort to keep things civil. Modding a community like that is piss easy, you can generally check every thread yourself and see any nastiness easily before it becomes a problem, and the users themselves are more invested in keeping things on topic and friendly. Disagreements are generally resolved amicably, and even when things get heated it's easy enough to bring things back to center.

Then the community starts to grow, and gather more users. Ok, you adjust, maybe add another mod or two, the users are still engaged and reporting threads regularly. Things stay more or less the same. The growth continues.

At 50k, 100k, 250k, etc you notice differences in the community. People argue more, and because the usernames they're arguing with aren't known to them, they become more vitriolic. Old regulars begin drifting away as they feel sidelined or just lose interest.

At 1M a major shift happens and the sub feels more like a free for all than a community. As a mod, you can't interact as much because there's more traffic. You stop being able to engage as much in the threads because you have to always be "on" and are now a representative of the mod team instead of a member of the community. Even if you've been there since day one, you're now a mod, and seen by some as "the enemy". Mods stifle free speech after all, removing posts and comments that don't fit the sub rules, banning users who are abusive or spammers. Those banned users start running to communities like SRC, decrying the abuse/bias/unfair treatment they've gotten at the hands of X sub mod team. Abusive modmails and PMs are fairly regular occurrences, and accusations of bias fly. The feeling of "us vs them" is amplified.

Once you get above 10M users, all bets are off. Threads hit /r/all regularly and attract participants from all over reddit. These threads can attract thousands of comments, coming at the rate of several hundred every minute. Individual monitoring of threads becomes impossible. Automod can handle some of it, but we all know automod can be slow, goes down sometimes, and can't handle all the nuances of actual conversation. You've outgrown any moderation tools reddit provides, and need to seek outside help. Customized bots become necessary - most large subreddits rely on outside tools like SentinelBot for spam detection, or snoonotes for tracking problem users. Harassment is a real problem - death threats, stalking, and doxxing are legitimate issues and hard to deal with. I won't even touch on the issues like CP, suicidal users, and all the other shit that comes along with modding communities this large.

I wish I had some solutions, but I really don't know what they are. We all know the tools we have as moderators on reddit are insufficient, but what people often overlook is why - the community is just too large for unpaid volunteers to moderate with the limited tools we have.

I've been grumbling about many of the things Tildes is trying to address for years. And I'm not alone. OTOH I have seen some sites that do some bits right, and some sites that almost got it right only to fall flat at the penultimate hurdle. Let's try to collect and enumerate what I think is good and bad, both here and elsewhere. I'm optimistic about here because Tildes is a work in progress and some of these are quite readily fixable.

Tildes, the good:

#1, a long way ahead of everything else: Non-profit.
I think Twitter and Reddit and Facebook all amply demonstrate why any general discussion forum that tries to make a profit is doomed to mediocrity and worse. Google+ is an edge case - the service may be free, but Google is watching and measuring your every move. And constantly optimising for their own performance metrics, of which fostering intelligent discussion totally is not on the list and is actually discouraged. See:
'The Algorithm' is Not an Idiot, It Is Actively Deceptive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/51mme29dSMy

#2 Markdown (also a coutny mile ahead of the alternatives) - elegantly simple markup; not too much, not too little. Even if you have technical quibbles with markdown's capabilities, the system is widely-enough known to outweigh them. I honestly can't think of a more appropriate choice.

#3 Clean simple UI (couple of grumbles though - see below)

#4 'Votes' rather than +1s, thumbs up, likes or or other cutesy shite. Elementary good UI practice - say what you mean.

Tildes, the bad including what I hope are readily fixable or just oversights:

#1 Poor display contrast. Don't use light grey text on white, you numpties, just because it's fashionable. If you want this site to be around long-term you'll have people of all ages posting, some with e.g. poor eyesight. There are well-known guidelines for the optimum contrast ratios for online text. Look 'em up and bloody stick within them. If you go for AAA that will be another point where you're ahead of the Google, Apple and other fashion-driven sites. Don't care if it's unfashionable, and if you want to be around in 20 years (as another successful discussion site I'll cite later has been) you should stick with what's usable, not what's currently cool. KTHXBAI. WebAIM: Colour Contrast Checker
https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

#2 Missed opportunity, fixable:

You can look at activity from the last hour, day, 3 days etc, or enter a flexible range. But you've only made the range one-ended!! So how are you supposed to find a post from 'about 6 months ago' without scrolling through thousands of entries? Again, if you're interested in longevity, you have to ensure that it's possible for humans to refind older posts, and to check back to a specific date range that may eventually be months or years back. My 'long-lived site' inserts markers with month and year so that you can tell where you are in the feed without having to peer at some tiny date in light grey on lighter grey.

#3 Vague datestamps

Use dates FFS. 'About 2 hours ago' is a moving target, duh. How are you supposed to refind a post timestamped 'about 2 hours ago' on a fast-moving thread that was left sitting unrefreshed on your laptop for half a day while you were disconnected from the internet? Useless. For short periods, yes, some users may prefer a vaguer indicator, but once a post is more than about 12-16 hours old, just use the date and time, OK? Vague timestamps, while superficially user-friendly, are a superb and subtle way to disrupt the serious discussions Tildes wants to foster. That's why Google+, for example, does it, and that's why you shouldn't. Also, if the date's in a predictable, stable form, you can search for it. Load a shit-ton of posts going back months, then try searching for a post made 'two months' ago; then search again in a couple of weeks and the same search will give different results!

#4 Preview and save button

Where's my post preview button? I would have like to preview this screed before posting it. And given how long it is maybe saving it as a work in progress would have been useful too!

Missing feature: effective filtering/killfiling
Long-term, if the site gets big, it will live or die on this. Seriously.
You need to be able to filter users, posts, and thread and groups temporarily or permanently.
That includes being able to temporarily hide people you follow and like just to get their posts out of the way. So, mute for an hour, mute for a day, mute for a week, mute for a month (maybe), mute permanently. Applicable to every possible category on the site you can think of. dredmorbius (who is also here) goes on about this a lot. The ability to filter stuff out is far more important than the ability to 'find' stuff. Just filtering out the stuff you don't want helps the stuff you do bubble to the surface!

Saveable filters (long term feature)

When I want to collect cat memes, non-cat memes are noise and I need to filter them out (see above). When I want to read about other sutff, the cat memes are noise and I need to filter them. I don';t want to have to keep creating and discarding filters. As soon as your filtering system is powerful enough to be useful, it will be too much work to keep redoing, so make 'em saveable and organisable. There's uses for all of whitelists, greylists and blacklists.

Post auto indexing (long term feature)

I have to manually write and maintain my own damn post indexes on G+, otherwise all my old posts just vanish into limbo, inaccessible unless you know a unique search phrase from that particular post or are prepared to scroll for hours. [But the Goodle internal servers can access and analyse them all just fine.] My post index, with some comments: https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/XoWoRujTBun

Rapid browse mode, paginated

When you're reading in depth, it may be OK to have a Google+-like UI with only half a dozen posts on-screen at once. (Tildes is currently shopwing me ten at a time, which ain't enough of an improvement to be worthwhile.) But this is hair-tearingly inefficient if you want to scan a lot of posts rapidly. You need a dense display format that shows large numkbers of posts so people can skim and find things quickly. With thumnails for images and indicators for links. Paginated, with the pages staying at consistent points. That way you can keep track of you place when you're browsing back in the archives, and even bookmark old stuff. Sometimes you want leisurely mode, but sometimes you want to jump back a way before switching to leisurely. Having only a slow browsing route is very effective at killing access to older discussions. Anything older than a few days or a few dozens of posts is effectively lost.

Soft auto-lock for old posts
Posts should auto-lock after... about 3 months of inactivity is a good number IME. But ideally it should be a soft lock, which means people can resurrect them. If you post on a soft-locked thread, you get a warning, or the owner gets to decide whether to unlock the thread and let your post appear. So consequently you need a preference setting so that post owners can indicate whether they want a soft or a hard lock on a post, and the time till it triggers.

Per forum thread/post limits
If you've got a forum with 1,000 active threads, you haven't really got one forum. You've either got several, in which case they should be split up, or you've got one forum with a lot of noise. So there might be something to be said for limiting the number of discussion threads in proportion to the number of users; for example, if ~dogs.chihuahuas has 5 users, let them have the default of 20 threads. Of which they might only use six. Nothing says you have to use all 20. But if ~dogs.pugs had 40,000 followers, perhaps it should be permitted 70 threads. If 70 isn't enough, it's probably past time to split ~dogs.pugs up. There is an uppser and a lower limit to how many people you can have a sensible discussion with. The lower limit is 2, and for small forums or up to a couple of dozen regulars 20 threads should be ample. When you get to hundeds or regulars, the thread count does need to go up a bit. But when you get to 10,000s, the noise levels starts to go up and it's time to split the group into subgroups. A thread count is a decent way to enforce that - I'd say even the biggest forum isn't allowed more than 2-3 screenfuls of threads. So 30-60, maybe. If that's not enough, it's time to subdivide, because keeping communities from getting too large keeps discussion quality higher. You can always follow both groups even after the split. But if you dislike regular A in group X, you can switch to group Y where they don't post. If everything's lumps together without regard to community scaling, you never get away from regular A unless you unsubscribe from group X altogether.

Other sites

Google+

Circles (bad, it turns out) - seemed good at the time, but it turns out they're at the wrong end of the broadcast stream. The recipients have no way to filter what you post into the categories they want, and it's their preferences that matter at this point.

Collections (good, it turns out) - this was the better way to do it. If someone posts cat pics, politics, and astronomy, you can just follow the subset of their posts you're interested in. This is reasonably effective, implicit filtering.

Infinite scrolling windows (very bad) - [But excellent for Google's purposes of stifling anything but superficial conversations.] Finding anything older than a few hours may take literally hours of scrolling unless there's a search term you can enter. So tough shit if you wanted to find an image post with no associated text.

Awesomely atrocious search Google used to be good at search. You wouldn't think so from the comedy search tool they provide on G+.

Notifications (meh) - When you only have a few followers, it's nice to know you've been followed or mentioned or whatever. As your user count grows that becomes noise and then spam. Notifications have to scale intelligently, because a user with 240,000 followers has massivly different needs from a user with 12.

My own comments: Google Plus User Feedback Archive https://plus.google.com/104879277024913363852/posts/DUanxsc7ya1

Ello

I like the clean UI, and it's very good for image posting.
The discussions ain't too bad either, but it's maybe a bit too minimalist, and again, there was no way to find old posts,l so they're effectively lost.

Twitter

Well it would be good if people actually used it for short posts of up to 2xx characters or whatever the present limit is. But when you have people writing articles that need dozens of Tweets (and there's aggregator apps to collect them back into full articles FFS) then the system is clearly not being used in the way it was originally intended to be. I think this is what corporations would like the future of all discussion to be. Basically babble, where even the good stuff vanishes without trace after, well, potentially a few tens of minutes if you follow a lot of people. It's like drinking at a firehose. Jeez. You harldy need to exert effort to bury stuff. Just wait a while.

Usenet

Good for: killfiles, threaded discussions, clue, and asynchronous discussions spanning weeks, months or longer.
Bad for: trolls, spam. Especially spam.

I sincerely hope there are some Tilders who are thoroughly familiar with the dynamics, successes and failures of Usenet. It does a lot of things right that you'll also need to get right. And now all the morons are on the web, I'm not sure if Usenet is reverting to clued people only, or if the spammers are killing it off completely. TBH I'm not sure there's much point spamming Usenet these days; next to no-one goes there, and those that do are tech-savvy and exceptionally spam-hostile. Haven't been on myself for years. A very good example of a private usenet area that works well is the Povray news hierarchy. Another demonstration that focus on a single subject (the PoVRay raytracer) does a good job of keeping site/forum/whatever clue levels high. news.povray.org http://news.povray.org/groups/

Web Forums

Good for: focussed discussions on a single subject. In general, the more focussed the higher the quality. The Wesnoth forums, for example, are all about the Wesnoth computer game. So it's easy to tell what's off-topic and remove it. But the Giant in the Playground forums, which also include general roleplaying, are not as focussed and the clue level of the posters, while not atrocious, is noticeably lower, and a much greater degree of moderation is needed. But the GiantITP forums are much bigger than Wesnoth, so there a lot of just scaling effects going on there too. You also see this on, I guess, the Steam forums and Reddit groups, where the small niche communities (e.d. OpenTTD on Reddit) tend to be much more pleasant places to visit than the forums for mega-games like, I dunno, World of Warcraft.

Reddit

Good for: Actually handling collossal volums of posts on all sorts of subjects without collapsing into chaos.
I'm not a big Reddit fan, but I have to give them credit for working at all, given their traffic volume.

Also good for: Reddit Gold isn't a terrible way to fund a commercial-ish site. Aspects of that could be stolen.

Wikis

Placeholder

Suspect there may be some things that could be learned from how Wikis do things, but nothing comes to mind at present. May revisit later.

Email lists

Good for: digests?

Digests might be a useful feature when you're following a long-running discussion?
Google+ almost got this right - you can opt to recieve an email whenever someone comments after you, but you can't get G+_ to send you emails fo your own posts, or to send you a summary/digest of the full discussion. So you can have a partial email archive of threads you've been involved in, but you can't have an email record of your own contributions. So, half of a useful feature there. Nice one, guys.

Mornington Crescent

These sites have been running for decades. They're basically text databases plus a bit of Perl glue code. A decent developer could (and has, more than once) knock out a fully functioning Mornington Crescent site in a matter of a few afternoons.

Good for: longevity, stability, simplicity, 'weak user IDs', asynchronous discussions which can become realtime if you're online at the same time as your correspondent.

Probably bad for: scaling, security
The Crescent sites have a couple of dozen game threads each, and you post a comment wherever you feel like. Then the next person does the same, and so on. Some of the long-running games (e.g. the genral chat thread) have 30,000+ posts spanning years. But becuase it's paginated rather than an infinite scrolling window, you can jump back e.g. 1,000 posts (a few months) with relative ease.

These sites all predate markdown, so they let you use basic HTML instead. A feature which has been horribly abused, most notably in the bad HTML game, and Acre Street (don't ask). A modern MC site, you'd use markdown.

They still work on any browser - even Lynx - they don't even depend on Javascript. It's a web form with two or three fields. You type on your comment, click submit, and your comment is inserted into the page. Then the next person does the same, over and over for years, and the page grows as you do. As simple as a a web forum can possibly be, I suspect. And if bandwidth/performance becomes a problem, you can auto-split it into year-sized or 1000-post-sized chunks. Yes, people mostly only browse the last few tens of posts, but a paginated system lets you jump back further on occasion without placing an undue burden on the servers. (I go on about pagination a lot. I think it's a make-or-break feature, and it's only out of favour at the moment due to the whims of fashion and the web-corps' desires to make and keep online conversations at a superficial level. The black hats are doing it intentionally, and others are emulating them because they wrongly think they're following good - rather than evil - practice.
Speaking of evil practice - check out Dark Patterns in Design for some of the ways we're manipulated: https://darkpatterns.org/

'Weak User ID' - there's a text box you type your name in. Most people use the same name every time, because it establishes reputation. But it's just a text box so you could type in anything. That bit probably wouldn't scale, but for us, given that between us we all know everyone who posts except for the occasional random who shows up, it works fine.

'Non-persistent chat' - one of the sites, which has since shut down, had a rolling chat page that was only transient. Chat posts older than about a week and more than 100 posts ago just disappeared off the bottom of the chat page and were lost for good, unless someone saved the chat. For some discussions - e.g. things like cat memes, this kind of transient chat is probably ideal. You could even implement an infinite scroller, because you know the end of the chat is never going to be more than 5-10 screens away. That wouldn't be so good for 50-100 screen. As a yardstick my G+ posts would probably go back about 1200 screens. Who the hell would ever scroll through that? If Tildes becomes successful, it will quickly hit to same point. Pagination, chaps. It's not sexy, but it's the only reasonable way to manage long data streams.

OK, initial data dump done. This is more complete than I epxcted to get for a first go, but more typos too :-)

Am likely to revist.

Hi everyone! In this challenge, we will build simple genetic algorithm.

The goal is to create genetic algorithm that will learn and output predefined text ("Hello World!").

The goal can be achieved with any language and you'll need just simple loops, collection and knowledge how to create and use objects, even beginners can try to complete this challenge.

How?

I'll try to explain it as best as I can. Genetic algorithms are approximation algorithms - they often do not find the best solution, but they can find very good solutions, fast. It's used when traditional algorithms are either way too slow, or they even don't exist. It's used to, for example, design antennas, or wind turbines. We will use it to write "Hello World".

First of all, we define our Entity. It is solution to given problem, it can be list of integers that describe antenna shape, decision tree, or string ("Hello World"). Each entity contains the solution (string solution) and fitness function. Fitness function says, how good our entity is. Our fitness function will return, how similar is entity solution text to "Hello World" string.

But how will the program work? First of all, we will create list of entities List<Entity>. We will make, for example, 1000 entities (randomly generated). Their Entity.solution will be randomized string of length 11 (because "Hello World" is 11 characters long).

Once we have these entities, we will repeat following steps, until the best entity has fitness == 1.0, or 100% similarity to target string.

First of all, we compute fitness function of all entities. Then, we will create empty list of entities of length 1000. Now, we will 1000-times pick two entities (probably weighted based on their fitness) and combine their strings. We will use the string to create new entity and we will add the new entity to the new list of entities.

Now, we delete old entities and replace them with entities we just made.

The last step is mutation - because what if no entity has the "W" character? We will never get our "Hello World". So we will go through every entity and change 5% (or whatever number you want) of characters in their solution to random characters.

We let it run for a while - and it is done!

So to sum up what we did:

entities <- 1000 random entities
while entities.best.fitness < 1:
  for every entity: compute fitness
  newEntities <- empty list
  1000-times:
    choose two entities from "entities", based on their fitness
    combine solutions of these entities and make newEntity
    newEntities.add(newEntity)
  for every entity: mutate // Randomly change parts of their strings

print(entities.best.solution) // Hello World!

Now go and create the best, fastest, and most pointless, genetic algorithm we've ever seen!

Hello ~games!

Like most of us, I spend way too much time gaming. Lately i've been playing Islands of the Nyne because PUBG hasn't been fun the past few patches. I normally play one genre at a time such as RTS, BR, MMO etc until i move onto a whole new genre of games.

What games or genre's have you been playing lately? Anything to recommend?

There was a story posted to Hacker News, The Return of the Super-Elite from Jacobin magazine. It was on the front page for a little bit of time. I refreshed and it was on the 2nd page.

5 hours later and it's down to #113, page 4. It has 88 points. The second youngest submission on page 4 is 16 hours old. On page 3, the youngest item is 6 hours old, and has only 7 points. So this article is newer, has a respectable amount of points but within 5 hours has been relegated to page 4, whereas an item that has fewer points and is 1 hour older is sitting on page 3.

edit: the rank keeps dropping, when I first wrote this post it was at #111, then #112, and when I submitted it was at #113, I just refreshed and it's at #114. Other submissions near the range of points and hours are ranking on page 1. On page 5 all items are from 1, 2 or 3 days ago.

I've noticed that any pro-unionization talk seems to disappear much more quickly than other stories.

So let's get our tinfoil hats on and ask is Hacker News suppressing leftist articles or suppressing articles of a certain type altogether?

Or maybe it's just a conspiracy of a bad algorithm for determining where submissions rank?

Government agencies around the world continue to run a dragnet on a large amount of communications, most of which is sent under the expectation of having a private conversation and yet the vast majority of the public seems apathetic to the issue. Why is this? Is it because of an underlying cynicism and belief that you can’t do anything to stop them? Is it because you don’t care and are using the “I have nothing to hide” argument? Do you think that it is too much work to protect yourself? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I hope that we can at least talk about it and maybe I can even convince you to care if you’re willing to hear me out.

First, lets take a look at what these agencies actually do. There are many to pick from such as the CIA, FBI, MI6, MI5, the NSA, GCHQ, and FSB just to name a few. Their goals are pretty much the same as far as intrusive espionage goes. They all want to gather as much data as possible in hopes of finding political dissenters and protest groups, information on powerful leaders from other governments (usually with a strong potential for blackmail) and terrorists (although they rarely ever find them). Like many tyrannical practices before them, it is done under the guise of national security. This is because people are usually willing to sacrifice their freedoms for more (perceived) security. It is important to note that these agencies do not solely operate domestically. They are global threats and their reach extends far further than you may think. Just because you live in the EU does not mean you are safe from their reach.

Does it sound like I’m exaggerating here? It can’t be that bad can it?

Well, lets look at the facts. We don’t know that much about these agencies but what we do know is absolutely terrifying. Whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have shown us that their technology is being used for far more than just hunting terrorists. In fact, the NSA and GCHQ have essentially been running a dragnet on the entire world. Here is an article on the GCHQ showing how they hacked the cell phones of foreign politicians attending the G20 summit in 2009. They did not discriminate, they simply tapped everybody so they could read their texts and listen in on their calls to see whats going on. Here is a similar story where the NSA collected phone calls of Verizon subscribers, only this time they weren’t looking at politicans and suspects, they were either spying on you or people like you. The more recent Vault 7 and 8 leaks showed that the CIA was engaging in similar practices such as developing tools to send information from Smart TVs. Using a code that was written and gifted to the CIA by the UK’s MI5. Even the FBI, a domestic federal police agency has been given the go ahead to hack any computer in the world. Here is some evidence of when they hacked over 8,000 computers in 120 countries using only one warrant (given by a US judge which is NOT valid in any other part of the world) during a child pornography investigation.

But they’re targeting criminals right? I have nothing to be worried about.

First of all, that is the same rhetoric being used by the Chinese Government as they continue to develop facial recognition technology (currently being used to take pictures of jaywalkers and post them on billboards), their social credit system and mandatory surveillance apps on the phones of their citizens. All in effort of building a surveillance state.

This has also not been the case historically. The two biggest enemies of the FBI in the 1960s was the Civil Rights movement and the Anti-War movement. The former article touches on the wiretaps placed on Martin Luther King Jr by the FBI, but its also important to note that they also sent him a death threat as well. The latter link is about the program that targeted both groups. Some modern day examples include the FBI’s survellance of PETA and Greenpeace as well as the NSA and GCHQ’s probe into humanitarian groups such as UNICEF. I also encourage you to read this post written by a redditor about what it is like to live in a surveillance state.

Ever since 9/11, the motto of US intelligence agencies and many others around the world who feared the same threats was “never again”. Never again would they let an atrocity like 9/11 take place. They would do whatever it took to prevent another disaster from happening and so they introduced the PATRIOT act in congress. This 2,000 page act appeared less than a month after the attacks, and was passed with an overwhelming amount of support. As Michael Moore showed in his mockumentary film Fahrenheit 9/11, a member of congress has openly admitted to not having read the bill as well as many of his colleagues. Concerning parts of this act can be found in here.

Now lets take a quick look at what happened in 2002. DARPA created a division of US government called the Information Awareness Office, now if that sounds Orwellian than just take one look at their logo. One year later in 2003 this organization started the Total Information Awareness Program which was described as a "Manhattan Project for Counter-Terrorism". The scope of this program was massive for the time and Senator Ron Wyden called it "biggest surveillance program in the history of the United States”. Sounds pretty creepy right? Yea, the American public thought so too, so DARPA responded in a brilliant stroke of genius to rename the program to Terrorism Information Awareness and suddenly nobody cared about being watched.

Okay, but I’m fine with them spying on me as long it helps them to thwart terror attacks.

Have you seen the news lately? The terror attacks that these practices are supposed to prevent still occur. There has yet to be one documented attack that has been prevented by any of these programs and I will prove to you why. During Edward Snowden’s tenure at the NSA, the Boston Marathon bombings happened.

Here we are in 2013 and the second biggest terror attack since 9/11 has occurred. Snowden watched the events unfold on the news while sitting in the NSA’s break room. He made a remark to his colleagues saying that he would bet anything that we already knew about the bombers, and that they had slipped through the cracks with nothing that could be done to stop them. Turns out he was right Russia had warned both the FBI and the CIA about the older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev but when the FBI investigated they found nothing. As Snowden so eloquently put it, “when you collect everything, you understand nothing”. Not only are these practices morally wrong, they are also ineffective.

One year later in 2014, Snowden decided to leak everything. He objected to the American and British government’s warrantless surveillance and decided that the public had a right to know what was happening. Among the numerous startling documents, he revealed a program called XKEYSCORE. This program works as a sort of search engine for intelligence agencies. Analysts with access to the system will search for keywords like BOMB and PRESIDENT or DONALD TRUMP. It will then give them a list of unsecured text messages, emails, social media posts and so on. In fact just by writing this, I will likely show up among one of these searches.

Okay, so if they are targeting everybody in the name of safety and they aren’t effective at keeping everybody safe, then why the hell are they still doing it?!

One word: power. Just imagine the things you could do if you had access to everyone’s texts, emails, Facebook posts, bank records, as well as the legal and technical means to gain root access to any of the billions of devices in the world. Sounds pretty impressive right? Unfortunately for us, it all comes at our expense and without taking the proper steps, our lives are not private in the eyes of the government. After all, you wouldn't let a stranger go through your phone, so why would you let a government?

I hope this information has been helpful to those of you who are either learning about this for the first time or getting a reminder on the extent of these invasive practices. I hope that you will reconsider the repercussions of these practices and maybe take steps to protect yourself. If there is any interest then I will post a part 2 later with things you can do to minimize this data collection. Its not as hard as you might think!

For those of you who are still not convinced that governments are a threat to your personal privacy, please drop a comment below so we can get a discussion going.

By the way, anyone who is interested in their privacy is likely under heightened surveillance due to interests in anonymity and security software.

I finally signed up on tildes, and just as on the other site, I immediately proceeded to unsubscribe from ~news, ~lgbt and ~food, just because I like to focus on my interests most of the times. However, when I'm hungry for more content, my limited tastes aren't enough. On reddit, /r/all used to provide a wild west, all-you-can-eat-buffet experience, which I don't find here.

I understand the site is in early alpha and community is small (which is the main attraction for me right now), so what do you guys think about something like /r/all for tildes?