My Windows Computer Just Doesn't Feel Like Mine Anymore.

Aww.

If you love it, set it free!

Did they thank anyone for fish? If so, that is a bad sign...

Hey, don't dump on Tom Scott

That thumbnail... Aargh! My eyes!

There are differing opinions on the historicity of the Jewish scriptures, but I believe the broad brush-strokes are sufficiently agreed on for our purposes.

So a little ancient history:

• there was a group of people, descended from one family (obviously plus intermarriage), called the Israelites or the Hebrews
• Around 1500BC (give or take a few hundred years?) they settled in the land we now call Palestine/Israel.
• But not them exclusively in that area, nor were they the first - and to some extent they remained an ethnically-exclusive group but it's a bit complicated.
• the Israelites/Hebrews comprised of 12 'tribes' each tracing their ancestry to one of the sons of Israel. (Or one of two grandsons... There's always added detail!)
• they split, though keeping some shared identity. The southern half was the tribes of 'Judah' and 'Benjamin' and became known as Judah; the other tribes were the Northern half. The people of Judah are called the Jews.
• around 500BC (give or take some hundreds) all the Israelites were conquered and most of not all moved to other lands for tens or hundreds of years
• some returned, keeping their identity intact (in their eyes)
• some returned but intermarried and we're considered only dubiously Israelite.
• some other communities in other parts of the world believe they are descendents of some Israelites who didn't return.
• around 0AD (give or take) the Romans occupied that land and then again the Jews/Israelites were scattered.
• still various communities, from that scattering, continued to identify as Jews.

That takes us - very crudely - up to the present day of the Jews/Israelites joining together again as the nation of Israel, in that land.

On the religious side:

• the Israelites believed in one God (and the gods other people worshipped as either complete lies/nonsense, or created by their God, or something more nuanced)
• they believed God had chosen them, as a nation / ethnic group, to be in special relationship to him, and that his connection to other people in the world would be through them.
• the idea was (with some exceptions) that joining the Jewish religion (i.e. worshipping their God on His terms) essentially meant the same as joining in the Israelite ethnic group.
• after the split between Jews and other Israelites, the Jews came to believe the others had compromised the religion so it wasn't true any more; hence now Jewish religion (Judaism)
• when Jesus of Nazareth came (around 30AD) his followers believed he was the fulfillment and continuation of the Jewish religion and in a way that could now include people from all the world, without becoming Jewish. (hence Christianity being a religion not defined by ethnicity)
• Obviously, other Jews did not believe this! Hence Judaism continuing separately
• Islam (7th century?) believed much of the same tradition as Jews and Christians, but that the details recorded by Jews and Christians were wrong/lies, and Mohammad was the true final person bringing the truth from God

So then there's kind of three main identifications of 'Jews', all connected but looking from different perspectives.

• Ethnically: the people who are descended from the Kingdom of Judah (the tribes of Judah and Benjamin). Obviously that openes the question of whether people can join into said group, and whether intermarriage includes or excludes you.
• Ethnically II: the people descended from the whole nation of Israel. I believe they sometimes still get called Jews these days.
• Religious: the people who worship the Jewish God according to Jewish religion. Obviously this opens many questions of what counts as genuine/acceptable worship/religion.

And an extra note on the ethnic side: because the people identifying as Israelite/Israeli have been scattered for so long, even if you were to have a clear definition of what fits within the ethnic boundary (e.g. maitriliniage), it is hard - if even possible - to know when a community of individual claims Israeli descent what their genetic/ancestral descent really is. So there is necessarily some flexibility for the traditions of communities that claim certain lineage, and that flexibility is argued over. One might put a fourth option for identification:

• Community: the communities that trace themselves as descending from Jewish/Israelite community. Meaning the continuation of a community, which usually involves a large component of ethnic/familial descent as well as a large component of cultural/religious continuity.

P S. I'm on mobile so can't risk double checking egregious typos/etc without losing this long post. Apologies if I've put something really badly. I'll try to be attentive to comments and you can all downvote me to hell/Hades/Gehenna if it's too awful!

Syncthing is great!

Tell him a sad story.

The one about the cat that was run over is risky: might end up funny; but if you say it's time to go home, that's sad so he should come down.

Terrence Thatcher, T. May, Terroris, Ttruss;
Terry-Tories, Terry-Tories, make a fuss!

It also gives a different meaning to the citizens of British Overseas Tories!

Daemons Unleashed

You have finally win me over. I now live for communism, and die happy.

So, does this affect dual boot systems, if e.g. Windows is compromised, now that malware in the efi partition can compromise the Linux system next time it boots? Yikes!

I suppose in principle malware from one OS can attack the other anyway, even if the other is fully encrypted and/or the first OS doesn't have drivers for the second's filesystems: because malware can install said drivers and attack at least the bootloader - though that night have been protected by secure boot if it weren't for this new exploit?

* cracks knuckles * Time to roll out a federated, truly open source generative AI and use it to ((checks notes)) mock Disney.

2. Yes you are! This is the internet! Stop being nice and start hating people!!

That sounded darker when I misread your comment as

the death of women in engineering

See, I love Haskell, and the reason I'd choose Rust for my one language is the feeling that in principle anything I can do in Haskell I can do in Rust, with a little extra percussive head trauma; but I can never have the control in Haskell to do the beautiful efficiency I can do with Rust if I ever actually did any programming.

the notion that we basically just replaced horses with cars .... We’ve replaced horses and trams and walking and cycling - all of which were done a lot - with cars.

Fair point

we have pretty much gained nothing from cars.

I don't think that's true, though. Cars bring a lot of utility; even the opportunity to live further from the workplace is not 'no benefit'. After all, bicycles were hailed as the liberators of women, for much the same reason: ordinary women could have the freedom to travel further. I think what's happened is that every gain is an opportunity for benefit; but also an opportunity for the greedy and powerful (not to mention lazy, deceitful, foolish, or any combination of the above) to take advantage of other people (and themselves) through. So (for example) cars bring the opportunity to work further from your house; and now many people are forced into living further from their work because employers/infrastructure expect it to be possible. Cars make it much easier to visit far-away relatives for festivals; now Americans must line up every year on Reddit to moan about Thanksgiving politics.

I will agree with you it'd be better if we restructured most transport away from cars and that we have - in principle - the options for a good solution (trams, bicycles, better-arranged-cities, etc). Still, what would the American dream be, without driving to your gym every week so you can run on the treadmill for half an hour ;-p

I'm happy to merit your insufficient-car-brains certification :-)

What quite do you mean? That horses weren't used in the same way or for the same demographic as cars are now? Sure, and you also don't refill them every 200 miles from the nearest highway hay-station. (Well, kind of...) But there were still horses clustered in many cities for a lot of the time, right? Where now there are cars? And as transport such as did use the one mainly transitioned to the other. I don't suppose there's hard, quantitative data on car-induced vs horse-induced deaths/injuries within cities at certain eras, but maybe someone has that data somewhere!

Actually, to go another step from your point: I suppose if cars, in their same number and usage, were traded for horses, then besides the epic problem of feeding them all, many cities would be far more dangerous now from the great horde of horses marching through every day!

Hot take: let the bank release tweets like this as a honeypot, and see who tries to log in.

That sounds pretty cool, though I'd be concerned it will suffer from the classic problem of current AI (...and humans, but that's by the by) of confident incorrectness. Like an automatic transmission can miss meanings and types of context that a human will spot, programmatically generating speech can probably mess up punctuation and flow - even the way a human reader sometimes will get part way through a sentence and realise they need to start again for it to come out right.

That said, I can't see it being a big problem for most works, just unfortunate here and there. For once it seems an AI application short on downsides! (Except for the usual economic ones for many people previously trained in the field.)

You're basically advocating for human extinction in this comment

I'm so glad someone finally understands me