Yeah, part of the reason I consider volunteering as better than donating, but not everyone has the time. It’s more difficult to embezzle labor.

Mmm, and we do like to make extreme arguments just to score holier-than-thou points, don’t we?

There will always be something wrong. Taxes still fund public services. The need for those services doesn’t go away just because some of the money is diverted to atrocities.

If you actually want to end genocidal conduct, your personal taxes are not the place to fight that battle, and trying to fight it by yourself doesn’t make you a hero. Collective action with a like-minded group is the most successful way to actually change things.

I don’t agree with every anarchist idea, but this I agree with completely. You really don’t need to know anything more about the circumstances of a person’s life if you notice them stealing food.

On a related note, but a somewhat non-anarchist take, pay your taxes and vote for politicians that support public programs. Shelters, halfway homes, soup kitchens and food banks do a lot of good. Also donate and/or volunteer if you’re able!

Clearly.

Believe it or not, there are sick people in hospitals.

Well, at least I’m not alone.

Yeah, that’s not how this works. Everyone is welcome to participate.

It’s not an analogy, it’s a philosophy.

A doctor must go where the sick people are.

I think the right approach is basically “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. In Mark Twain’s fantasy, his main character knows the basic principles of some modern technology, but the medieval period lacks any of the necessary material refining or manufacturing capabilities, so he has to work within the limitations of the time.

For this question, we are allowed to carry 15 tons of material from the present, which you can do a lot with. What could you bring that would actually be usable in the time period, and how could you apply it to actually change the course of events?

1918 is a very interesting time period to work in. Industrialization has spread, and automobiles have been around for awhile. Petroleum fuels are available for more than just lamplighting. Trains are not new at this point, but there are some interesting new ideas about not burning coal to make them run. The powered airplane was invented in 1903, and there was rapid development in this field between 1914 and 1918 due to the conflict in Europe. As WWI is drawing to a close, there’s a lot of leftover military hardware lying around, and probably some supply officers who wouldn’t mind writing off a few tanks in exchange for a bribe. There are opportunities that never existed before and never will again.

Practical application of radio is very new, accessible to only a small handful of people in the world who actually understand how it works. Battlefield communication is still largely done by hand-carried messages, with your best speed probably on a horse. Motorcycles exist, including military models, but the range is limited and they’re definitely not all-terrain vehicles. Telegraphs exist but are dependent on wiring infrastructure. Communications is still difficult, and instantaneous communication in the field is nearly impossible - a problem that can be solved today with a $20 walkie-talkie.

I would submit that, if your answer is essentially “bring 15 tons of money” then a proper answer to your original question requires at least an outline of how you’re going to spend that money in 1918: how you’re going to arrange purchases, who you’re going to buy from, what you’re going to buy, how you’re going to move the purchased goods and the money, how you’re going to protect them both at rest and in transit, and how the purchased supplies are going to change the outcome of the war.

So if you’re going to buy guns, for example, which manufacturer are you going to buy them from, which model, can they actually supply the model you want in the volume that you need in 1918, how are you going to get the gold to them and get the weapons back, and then which parts of the army are going to get those weapons and how does that lead to defeating the Russian army.

Otherwise you’re just bringing 15 tons of liability.

Sure, but you can’t eat it, you can’t kill your enemies or defend your homes with it, and having a big pile of it makes you a target. Hard to hide that once you start spending it.

Besides, in 1918 the walkie talkies alone are more valuable than anything you could buy. The current equivalent would be the SCR-68:

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/western_el_scr68scr_6.html

This was bulky, unreliable, complicated to operate, and had limited transmission power. It was portable only in the sense that it was built into an airplane.

Also, the Toughbooks… One modern laptop paired with one of the digital cameras would probably be worth more than 15 tons of gold in 1918. The radios would at least be understandable to technical experts of the time. The computer would be incomprehensible magic.

By December of 1918, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army “was just over 110,000 strong, divided into four Corps, consisting of 83,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, assault groups, artillery, reconnaissance, medical, and other detachments, including armoured cars and seven armoured trains.”

Shit. You’re not carrying supplies for an army of 110,000 in 15 tons. Forget food, water, small arms or ammunition in any capacity to supply the army.

How do we make a real difference, in 1918?

• 2 of the world’s most successful military vehicle: the Toyota Hilux, 1985 2.4L turbodiesel 4WD, ~3 tons. In 1918 we can get an equivalent for diesel fuel, even if it is a probably a little dirty compared to modern fuel.
• tools, spare tires, wheels, axles, drive shaft, transmission and engine block for same, 1.5 tons (4.5), basically an entire third truck worth of spare parts
• 2x trained mechanics for same, 0.25 ton
• vehicle service lift for same, 0.75 ton (5.5)
• 4x Browning M2 with 2x truck mounts for same, plus however much ammunition we can fit into 1 ton (6.5)
• 500x Midland Radio GXT67Pro 5W Walkie Talkie with chargers and spare batteries, plus 10x GMRS Waterproof Repeaters and 50x FlexSolar C60 60W Foldable Solar Chargers, 1 ton (7.5)
• 4x Generac 5000W Portable Diesel Electric Generators, 0.5 ton (8)
• 1x Sopwith Camel, two-seater variant, 2 tons (10)
• spare engine and control parts for same, plus tools, 0.5 ton
• trained pilot and mechanic for same, 0.25 ton
• 10x Olympus OM-1 Mark II with spare batteries, plus M. Zuiko 150-600mm lenses and EE-1 Dot Sights, and also 50x Olympus TG-7 Tough, 0.25 ton (11)
• 20x Panasonic Toughbooks with spare batteries, running some relatively simple version of Linux, with GIMP and LibreOffice installed, plus 10x Brother color laser printers of some variety and however much paper and extra toner cartridges can be fit into 0.5 ton (11.5)

Well, I guess we still have room for extras…

• 100x Barrett M99 chambered for .50 BMG, plus as much ammunition as we can fit into 1 ton (12.5)
• 0.5 ton of some variant of night vision goggles
• Fill the final 2 tons with some very simple model of RPG launcher and ammunition

The overall intention of all of this is communications, intelligence gathering and distribution, and high reliability and the capacity to actually operate and maintain it in eastern Europe in 1918.

The Toyotas are command field vehicles, with the Brownings for self-defense (not attack platforms). They should be able to handle almost any terrain and stay in operational condition. Each would carry one of the radio repeaters, a box of 20 spare hand radios and batteries, one of the portable generators, one of the OM-1 Mark IIs, one of the Barretts and two of the RPG launchers. The remaining hand radios get distributed out to field units, along with the solar chargers. The service lift is worth including so that the trucks can be serviced quickly and put back in the field.

The other two generators are intended to support a field command facility with several of the Toughbooks, the mechanical service equipment and the Sopwith.

The Sopwith is intended as an observation aircraft. It might get fitted with weapons, but more important is having a cameraman in the second seat. Two of the OM-1 Mark IIs will be in the airplane at all times. The pilot will take minimal risks. The intelligence from the photography will be worth much more than any potential combat wins.

The Toughbooks will be used for viewing and editing the collected photos from however many field units can be provided with the cameras. Olympus cameras are the choice because the micro 4/3 format is lighter and more compact than standard 4/3 DSLR cameras, and Olympus ruggedizes and weatherproofs all of their cameras. 20 of the TG-7s will be distributed out to field units for intelligence gathering, with messengers running them back and forth to command, so 20 more are in constant rotation, with 10 spares.

GIMP obviously for photo editing, and LibreOffice for reports and documentation. The printers are worth including so that intelligence reports can be distributed to field commanders who won’t have access to the computers, and the reports can be burned or otherwise easily destroyed as necessary.

The Barretts will be the most advanced weapons anywhere in the field. Their basic purpose is to punch holes in engine blocks from long range. I doubt there are any armored vehicles of this time period that can withstand a .50 BMG round. It could probably blow up the boiler of a steam locomotive. Give each sniper a set of the NVGs and put them in a position to deny the enemy use of any vehicles.

And obviously, the RPGs will be a force multiplier for any infantry unit. There won’t really be any equivalent firepower in the field.

High-resolution aerial photography of the battlefield, plus communications infrastructure built around the radios and the trucks, will put this group way ahead of any other military of the time. They’ll know where the enemy is and where they’re going at all times, and be able to share that information with their entire army. The war will be completely different in a week. Enemy armies will no longer be a threat after a month. They’ll control Moscow within 6 months.

OK, so if you can pass the host root filesystem to a container and then write files or execute code with root privileges on that filesystem, I would definitely consider that a container escape. You’re executing arbitrary code on the host from within a container.

On affected Omarchy systems, this means that the default user and all processes launched in that user session have access to root.

Hmm, maybe I’m misunderstanding. Does “all processes launched in that user session” not include containerized apps?

Once more for the people in the back:

CONTAINERS ARE NOT A SECURITY BARRIER

If you are relying on the container system to isolate and protect the OS from containerized apps, you are wrong.

Percussive maintenance:

All you’re doing is making some underpaid employee’s day harder, and causing problems for the other people who have no choice but to shop at the cartel grocer. Guarantee you the company doesn’t care and is not even slightly inconvenienced by your laziness, no matter how you try to rationalize it.

Yes… I believe I made that point in my comment.

I just want to point out that there is a valid use case for such a model. The massive amount of images uploaded to the internet every hour has created an exponentially growing need for content moderation, and unfortunately that means some people have to spend time reviewing material flagged as CSAM. This leads to a lot of mental trauma: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373947227_The_psychological_impacts_of_content_moderation_on_content_moderators_A_qualitative_study (not surprisingly).

This is a fucking awful job, and there’s way too much for human moderators to handle. Most people who do this job burn out within a year or two. Supporting their work with automated recognition takes some of the strain off of them. In an ideal world we wouldn’t need humans to do this work at all, but that’s unlikely. This is a very rare case where I 100% support replacing human labor with machine learning as much as possible. I can’t really imagine a worse job, personally.

There is a real benefit to training some models to automatically identify CSAM, but such a model should be specialized and only used internally for its intended purpose. It should never be publicly accessible. I suspect that what happened with Grok is an example of gross negligence/incompetence, where a model intended for CSAM identification was included in the overall Grok system.

If that’s not the explanation, then this is way more disturbing because anything else would have been done with intent.