without trusting anyone.

Well, except of course the entity that gave you the hardware. And the entity that preinstalled and/or gave you the OS image. And that that entity wasn't fooled into including malicious code in some roundabout way.

like it or not, there's currently no real way to use any significant amount of computing power without trusting someone. And usually several hundreds/thousands of someones.

The best you can hope for is to focus the trust into a small number of entities that have it in their own self interest to prove worthy of that trust.

I'm sorry that my attempt to find out what you want to be able to provide useful help annoyed you.

In the immortal words of Jake the Dog:

Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.

We are or were all noobs once. Going away from the keyboard is often an undervalued step in the solution-finding process. Kudos!

Have you heard of TV tropes? It's a wiki of ... well, tropes in story telling (warning: for some people following a single link to https://tvtropes.org/ means they find themselves half a day later with 32 tabs open and having read up on all kind of story tropes while having forgotten what time is).

On the one hand it will help you recognize the tropes and figure out how many of them are used in all story telling (yes, even the good ones), but on the other hand it can help appreciate that it's not the tropes or the broad strokes that make up a story, but how well it's told.

There's a reason there are so many movies/stories/plays that are just re-tellings of some Shakespear play or another: it doesn't matter that the outcome is known from the start. The journey and how well it's told is what's important.

So basically: "Oh yeah, that guy's gonna betray me. I wonder how and why exactly!"

I like to imagine that whenever there was a particularly slow day or someone was particularly stressed, they just opened the prepared article and tweaked and improved it a bit ... it's probably the collaborative work of many people over many years.

(Edit: this was meant as a reply to an apparently now-deleted (?) comment about why he deserves the anonymity of having his last name abbreviated).

He deserves it for the same reason a single mother raising a kid that gets involved in an armed robbery deserves it: basic human rights.

The idea of those is that they are universal and you'd have to have a very good reason to supersede them. If they are not universal, then they are just "suggestions" and then we end up with exactly the kind of society that this guy wanted.

And yes, being a major political actor is a good reason to lose that anonymity (which is also how it's handled in European media, there is no reporting on Angela M. or Emmanuel M.).

But this guy is a not a public figure in any reasonable sense any more. He's a stupid old guy that was one of the founding members of a extreme-right splinter party of a right-wing popular party in 1967. That party was banned in 1988. So it (and he) has not been relevant to anything for 35 years. He tried to become relevant with this stunt, fucked around and found out.

In fact, reporting on his full name is probably what he wants: publicity is what he was attempting to achieve, but anonymity is what he deserves (both as a basic human right and as punishment IMO).

Vielleicht weil die Datenlage schon lange nicht mehr das Problem ist?

Studien und Informationen haben wir schon lange. Sehr lange. Ja klar, rein technisch ist "mehr verifizierte Information zu einem wichtigen Thema" schon was gutes. Aber was wir wirklich brauchen (und zwar schon vor 10, 20, 30, ... Jahren) sind tatsächliche Veränderungen.

You only need to follow this advice if you (the player) have an antagonistic relationship with your DM.

Your character might suffer from the ideas you give them, but the player should get enjoyment from the situations you got.

More often than not the best answer to "Wouldn't it be hilarious if X happened?" is "Would it? Let's see! ..."

Not OP, but as someone using Ubuntu LTS releases on several systems, I can answer my reason: Having the latest & greatest release of all software available is neat, but sometimes the stability of knowing "nothing on my system changes in any significant way until I ask it to upgrade to the next LTS" is just more valuable.

My primary example is my work laptop: I use a fairly fixed set of tools and for the few places where I need up-to-date ones I can install them manually (they are often proprietary and/or not-quite established tools that aren't available in most distros anyway).

A similar situation exists on my primary homelab server: it's running Debian because all the "services" are running in docker containers anyway, so the primary job of the OS is to do its job and stay out of my way. Upgrading various system components at essentially random times runs counter to that goal.

I know at least one FAANG company that had (has? don't know) a policy of not using any hardware that was ever used in travel to China. If you had to go there on a business trip, you got a loaner laptop (and got your account severely restricted) and when you got back they wiped and discarded the laptop.

Always has been.

The "ham-fisted" assassinations have always been about just the tiniest sliver of deniability while definitely sending the message "we can reach you" and not making a secret about who "we" is.

I promise this isn't a generic anti-crypto rant, but rather a specific anti-crypto rant:

There are many projects in this space that try to replace what they perceive as flawed legal systems with perceived "perfect" (or at least better) digital, automated systems.

And I definitely understand that urge: there are many problems with various legal systems ranging from annoying (like being slow and very disparate around the world) to massive (biases, lack of access for those who need it most).

So aiming to improve that situation is understandable. And being pessimistic about the chances of fixing those systems with the "normal approaches" (i.e. politics) is equally understandable.

Where these projects usually break down though is that they generally lack an understanding of what makes legal systems so hard to get right: no one has found a reliable way to encode a non-trivial part of the law into something that a computer can decide reliably and without wrong decisions. (there are of course other difficulties, but this is the most lenient one for the current topic).

People with a technical background (which includes me) are often frustrated how laws and legal documents like licenses are at the same time both written in an arcane inaccessible language and also very much prone to interpretation. We assume, based on the languages we interact with, that a sufficiently complex language should allow a strict, formal interpretation of some truth value ("was this contract followed by both parties?").

But the reality is that contracts (just like most laws) are intentionally written with some subjective language to both account for real world deviations and avoid loopholes.

It's incredibly easy for a law to apply when it's not meant to (or the opposite: to present a law as not being meant to apply to a certain situation when the authors were very aware of the implications) or to not apply due to some technicality.

And for all the wrong in legal systems that exists we have not yet found abetter way to solve this than (hopefully neutral) arbitrators that interpret the text and underlying intentions.

And all the crypto schemes categorically decline that: their stated goal is to not have a human in the loop anywhere. That would be fine if they also solved the above problems in some other way, but none that I know of even attempt to do that. They simply pretend that perfect, decideable contracts are possible (even easy!) and never unfair.

Whether that error is based on ignorance or on something more sinister is up to the reader to decide.