I assume good faith unless clear evidence indicates otherwise. I try to adopt a more general version of WP:AGF in life.

Excess opioid use can cause dependence and increase tolerance to the painkilling effects faster than tolerance is built to the effects it has on respiration. As such, certain types of opioids are exceptionally dangerous when abused without mechanisms to deal with overdoses. Therefore, we say that abusing opioids is bad for health.

On the other hand, we can take the example of the early human who found joy in gathering food. Similar to the argument about “pathways being influenced”, we see that neural pathways are reinforced because of repeated concentration on the same goal. However, treating this as an addiction means that once this “addiction” is cured, humans will no longer want to get food. That means that humans will suffer adverse effects due to giving up the desire to gather food. Someone particularly ignorant could even extend this argument to call water and oxygen addictive.

Clearly, a line must be drawn to distinguish between things that are addictive and those that are not. You gave the example of reading and said that excessive concentration causes reading to behave in mechanisms similar to drugs and I totally agree with that statement. However, the fact remains that reading does not cause negative impacts on health despite repeated exposure to reading whereas the same is not true for drugs.

Since you asked for a narrower and non-speculative explanation of the fact that drugs do damage and books do not, let me ask a concrete question in reply. You stated that you have taken psychedelics in the past. Do you feel that if you had encountered a bad episode, you would have had the ability to leave the episode immediately? Would there have been a way to flush all psychedelics from your body? Clearly, with books, you can just stop reading the book, throw it in a paper shredder, or burn it to ash. Can you do the same with all drugs? Is reversibility really that easy for every single drug?

One could argue that binge reading is harmful and I totally agree. But the overall benefits of reading are sufficiently powerful as compared to the extremely low rate of addiction.

In fact, if looking at DSM-5 criteria, we can almost entirely ignore all points related to social impairment as reading is a major social obligation in a lot of places. Similarly, tolerance does not build up when reading. Another example of DSM-5 criteria we can ignore is the fact that physical and psychological problems do not occur. In fact, we can say that the only meaningful criteria are those related to withdrawal and those related to impaired control.

In books, the rate of impaired control is generally negligible as is the rate of withdrawal. Similar to how someone who drinks fifty litres of water a day is generally considered addicted to water, so is a person who reads instead of eating, taking care of personal hygiene, and sleeping. Yet the general rate of both water addiction and reading addiction is absurdly low when compared to the benefits.

Generally, books are considered non-addictive because they enhance one’s quality of life without causing negative health effects. It is a non-speculative fact that books have very little adverse effects. Requiring concentration alone is not sufficient to call something addictive. While it is true that anything done in excess is bad (e.g., getting too much oxygen or water), most people read in moderation. Something addictive needs to be damaging to the general quality of life. That is precisely why all pharmaceutical drugs given for medical purposes are given with one question in mind: will taking a given drug increase or decrease the quality of life in the short and long term.

NOTHING IN THIS REPLY CONSISTS OF MEDICAL ADVICE

I have not added inline citations as I do know which of these points are likely to be challenged. For further reading, please read about the DSM-5 criteria.

If I understand correctly, you said that jobs should be mandatory even if they serve no purpose. However, Marxist theory argues differently. It calls for work that contributes to human betterment. When implementing this, some Soviet policies took an extreme approach. Authorities often prioritized statistics (for example, full-employment targets) and sometimes created make-work or nominal positions.(as mentioned in the messages above) As a result, policy often prioritized employment statistics over the actual human and social benefits of work.

Even if one assumes the Holodomor was not man-made, it was certainly worsened by government inefficiency and poor decision-making.^[1] The government’s intentions may have been benign, but the result was the same as if they had been malicious.

^[1]Mentioned in some of the sources you cited and in your post.

I agree Melania can be seen as a passive participant. I never objected to you being critical of her. Instead, my issue was with the reason you gave, which compares survivors of sexual abuse to an embodiment of evil. That comparison is deeply offensive to people who were abused. Calling my response “virtue signaling” misreads me: I genuinely found your message hurtful.

There were many people who experienced Trump, Epstein etc. “cumming in them” through no fault of their own. Please don’t compare survivors of sexual abuse to an entity that many associate with evil.

Assuming a mechanism exists that changes the universe from being singly connected to multiply connected (i.e., wormholes exist), it is possible to have wormholes permitting faster-than-light travel without time paradoxes, though some additional restrictions may apply.

We have already shown that wormholes connect across both space and time, so that a trip between star systems could take you hundreds of years into the future, and the return trip takes you hundreds of years back in time. And this is even before we throw in how time slips between planets when considering relativistic time dilation due to different speeds and gravitational potentials.

Fortunately, all the weirdness of different time rates and going backward and forward in time can be ignored by the average person. This is because you never need to go from one world to another, or back, across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. You just take the wormhole between them. All you ever need to worry about is the coordinate frame that goes across the wormhole. When considering this reference frame, you’re not hopping all over the place in time. If it takes ten minutes to cross the wormhole between the two planets, when you get to your destination world the clocks will read ten minutes later than they did when you left your departure world. By coordinating their time-keeping across the wormhole network, all of the worlds of the network can agree on a common time to coordinate their activities. This is all travelers ever need to worry about, and they can then ignore all the relativistic weirdness. Your network engineers will still need to keep track of relative time drift and how close a given configuration is getting to a time loop. But unless your protagonist is a network engineer, they can just ignore all that stuff. And, as an author, so can you! Assume your engineers are competent, you have good regulatory bodies and standards institutions, and don’t worry about any of this “time travel” that doesn’t actually let you cause paradoxes.

source: Galactic Library

Yes, it is visible when a new trusted device is added. The QR code you scan to link a device contains a one-time public key for that device (ECC is used partly to fit the public key more easily into a QR code). Signal on the phone then sends a lot of information, including the identity keys, to the new device. The new device uses these identity keys to communicate. Note that the transfer of identity keys is fully encrypted, with encryption and decryption taking place on the clients. This can, of course, be bypassed if someone you’re talking to has their security key compromised, but the same risk exists if the recipient takes a screenshot or photographs their device’s screen.

Edit: The security key refers to the one-time key pair generated to initiate the transfer of identity keys and chat history. It can be compromised if someone accidentally scans a QR code and transfers their identity keys to an untrusted device.

I assumed that not only the entire app but also the entire client device had been audited. This was a client-side attack, not Meta momentarily adding itself to the trusted-device list. I’m confident it was a client-side attack because it would be impossible to hide even a momentary change in keys from the client without modifying the client app to conceal such a change.

Even in an “insecure” app without air-gapped systems or manual encryption, creating a backdoor to access plaintext messages is still very difficult if the app is well audited, open source, and encrypts messages with the recipient’s public key or a symmetric key before sending ciphertext to a third-party server.

If you trust the client-side implementation and the mathematics behind the symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, messages remains secure even if the centralized server is compromised. The client-side implementation can be verified by inspecting the source code if the app is open source and the device is trusted (for example, there is no ring-zero vulnerability).

The key exchange itself remains somewhat vulnerable if there is no other secure channel to verify that the correct public keys were exchanged. However, once the public keys have been correctly exchanged, the communication is secure.

There is no central location to donate to open source software in general. Most open source projects include donation details on their website or in their code repositories.

The individual who readily labels others pedophiles merely for wanting to rescue kids (see Unsworth) yet creates tools lacking any reasonable safeguards against child abuse material (measures that should have been relatively simple to implement) does not meet my definition of success. Likewise, a person who fails to meet his own deadlines is not successful even from some capitalistic perspectives. Someone who constantly seeks validation is not considered successful by most standards. All in all, Musk is an unsuccessful pedo guy.

I assume that trolls try to provoke erratic and disproportionate reactions from others, becoming a part of their own miniature sitcom for their own entertainment. It could be because of a sense of victory upon watching others break down (assuming a zero sum point of view). It could be the viewpoint that trolls are at their own higher level compared to others and understand each other while making fun of the lower levels (a false sense of superiority). Maybe it’s a [case of] holding onto their own beliefs and assuming that they needn’t change themselves if they disrupt all conversations that may cause harm to their own beliefs. It might be attention seeking or an escape mechanism. It could also be a desire to avoid fitting in with everyone else and remaining separate.

(edit: grammar)

There are some generic observations you can use to identify whether a story was AI generated or written by a human. However, there are no definitive criteria for identifying AI generated text except for text directed at the LLM user such as “certainly, here is a story that fits your criteria,” or “as a large language model, I cannot…”

There are some signs that can be used to identify AI generated text though they might not always be accurate. For instance, the observation that AI tends to be superficial. It often puts undue emphasis on emotions that most humans would not focus on. It tends to be somewhat more ambiguous and abstract compared to humans.

A large language model often uses poetic language instead of factual (e.g., saying that something insignificant has “profound beauty”). It tends to focus too much on the overarching themes in the background even when not required (e.g., “this highlights the significance of xyz in revolutionizing the field of …”).

There are some grammatical traits that can be used to identify AI but they are even more ambiguous than judging the quality of the content, especially because someone might not be a native English speaker or they might be a native speaker whose natural grammar sounds like AI.

The only good methods of judging whether text was AI generated are judging the quality of the content (which one should do regardless of whether they want to use content quality to identify AI generated text) and looking for text directed at the AI user.

Is there a specific “undress” button? I tried looking for proof that it exists but couldn’t find any (my searching skills clearly need work). Could you please share a screenshot or point me to a place where I can confirm that it exists?