The UK Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion movements were infiltrated and the activists received lengthy jail terms. I did wonder about their recruitment methods and it seemed that people randomly came into contact with the group, making identification of feds a problem. You would imagine that it’s pretty difficult for the fed to maintain the required level pretence to remain undetected but they are probably terrible people to start with.

You hate to see it, whomp whomp

Eat my shorts

While I recognise some of this dysfunction in my life, I think it is possible to avoid the worst excesses. I have a workshop and a tool fetish, which can be expensive but most of my tools have paid for themselves several times over considering the money saved doing things for myself.

We have bad impulse control but we’re also good at improvising, it’s not all bad. I don’t actually care that much about having an attention deficit, I just want to be treated compassionately, the way I treat other people.

Get in on the ground floor

139 over here. The most confusing part about it is that parents are often also neurodivergent and so whacky behaviour can be normalised during childhood. Then we get out into the world and have to learn a load of nuanced social cues in order to fit in. It is very strange to find out as a 47 year old that your experience is significantly different to most people and set about unlearning those masking behaviours.

Cultivating a good working routine is fulfilling but it’s a long road and we should not criticise people who struggle with this. When I hear people railing against authority figures it makes me cringe because it’s a sign that they’ve been mistreated (oppositionally defiant disorder).

Even my cat is like ‘leave me alone, wtf is wrong with you?’ This is the long road to becoming a socially acceptable person. None of this is written down or ever stated by anyone but if you violate social norms too much you end up quite lonely.

Everywhere the English went they created first past the post electoral systems which are notoriously vulnerable to this situation. We shouldn’t be surprised but we should be asking for something better before it’s too late to make meaningful change.

In that case we have to rely on Elons white power.

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The successful candidate

Well said. Anarchism has received horrible press at the hands of Big Democracy but many of our current problems are rooted in the concentration of power, money and influence that capitalist societies seem to produce. On the other hand, can we live without the many products and technology that require large scale effort? It feels like that would be a major challenge for any fledgling anarchic society.

Make the eggs bigger

Jokes on you, I already have crabs

You could also argue that this was a very old man. Is god asleep at the wheel?

Let’s make an algorithm army, get it drunk and it will start a fight with American tech.

I’m probably in the same boat as you, I have zero formal CS education. The way I originally learned was various: by embarking on small projects, fixing broken computers so I could play games, reading books, watching videos. The key thing in learning any subject is to recognise that when you don’t understand something it’s usually because some foundational knowledge is missing. You cannot properly understand a computer file system before you grasp the concept of binary numbers, bits and bytes, for instance.

Lately I’ve been using Chatgpt. You can ask it to write code in any language. Ask it to solve a particular problem and then start dismantling the answer, step by step. When you don’t understand the answer, ask it to elaborate. For your purposes, you could ask it to script a port scanner on your home network. This is key skill for any aspiring hacker and if you can get that working on your LAN, those principles can be adapted to WAN. Get a copy of the CIA vault 7 library, ask chatgpt to explain snippets of the code. I would imagine you have to preface your questions as coming from a ‘white hat’ perspective or it may balk.

A basic grounding in computer science would be a good starting place.

Do you know the difference between the various processor architectures and operating systems? Do you know the difference between real time computers and interrupt based systems? Are you familiar with the seven layer network model and which layers the different services interact with the hardware and application software? Are you grounded in cryptography and the system of public and private keys, modulo operations, prime number factorisation?

This is assuming that you already understand coding and are proficient in at least one language. None of these skills and knowledge on their own are indispensable or completely necessary but these things are what computers are made of, how they communicate and how they are secured.

The English are slowly fading into obscurity. They became hugely powerful during the hegemonic colonial era and that shine diminishes relentlessly year on year. These people cannot change and have consistently failed to take the necessary action to reform. Ironic that they took the word ‘reform’ to create a party that attracts reactionaries and racists to lead them backwards into obscurity. Good luck English people, you will need it.