If conservative means “cautious and wary of unexpected results”, “disillusioned with methods that we tried and failed with” or maybe even “equipped with experience of successful and failed cooperation with various sorts of people”, then yes. Already before age 50, I’m spoiled with various good and bad experiences. I cannot exclude that as my tendency to explore decreases (psychology tends to affirm this trend), I may get prejudiced too. I may have to figure out something to counter it.

But if conservative means that I suddenly don’t want a society with equality and without hierarchy, then - nope.

/me listening to the sound of a WinXP virtual machine booting under Debian Linux

They can shoot their foot with a grenade launcher next. I’m already out of range.

Having once worked on an open source project that dealt with providing anonymity - it was considered the duty of the release engineer to have an overview of all code committed (and to ask questions, publicly if needed, if they had any doubts) - before compiling and signing the code.

On some months, that was a big load of work and it seemed possible that one person might miss something. So others were encouraged to read and report about irregularities too. I don’t think anyone ever skipped it, because the implications were clear: “if one of us fails, someone somewhere can get imprisoned or killed, not to speak of milder results”.

However, in case of an utility not directly involved with functions that are critical for security - it might be easier to pass through the sieve.

Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.

As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.

Both of you are right.

It’s difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is “maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds” -> it is “give a team of coders half a year” difficult. It’s been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.

If it’s “identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it’s worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest”, then it’s currently not worth trying.

I’m convinced 99% people posting that same blog post that sells opinions as facts, haven’t actually lived through it.

I’m a person who lost contact with people on Facebook while using Pidgin. This unfortunate development in ancient history actually forced me to briefly register on Facebook to maintain contact - because they couldn’t be convinced to adopt Pidgin and Pidgin users were a minority (as were users of other XMPP messenger apps, at least separately counted).

Prognosis: Facebook will play along to gain mass, then go incompatible. They will do this at a moment when they think users will gravitate towards their side of the fence.

Advise: never open that door, there be dragons on the other side.

We should remember what they have already done, and expect more of the same, because they haven’t changed. Justified grudges are perfectly fine to hold. A corporation that has harmed society by supporting polarization in many countries (formation of echo chambers, targeted advertising) should be boycotted in retribution.