I think there are two more questions that need to be answered first, before being able to tell whether we should prioritize the many.

First question is what is the ultimate goal behind prioritizng the many? Happiness of the population? Infinite growth? To conquer the stars? Depending on what the goal is, there are occasions where minorities should be the focus if we want to approach the goal the fastest.
Example is moon landing: The amount of resources that was spent on “simply” building a rocket, space suits & equipment, and send a couple of humans over there was prioritizing the few. Despite a lot of people watching with curious eyes, it did not benefit the many’s needs much. There were several goals here: Being before the USSR, explore the unknown, satisfying shareholders, and more. By the many working hard to send the few, we approached all these goals faster than if we would allocate some of these resources towards the many’s needs, like health (prime days of smoking cigarettes).

The second question is what timeframe are we talking? Is it long-term or short-term success we’re aiming for? Because in many cases, if we want long-term success fast, the many are those who should “suffer”.
Example is where the long-term goal is the glorious evolution of mankind: In one way, we downprioritize the few who are those born with defects, either by culling them or by ensuring they do not make offspring. In another way, we downprioritize the many who are on- or below-average intelligence/capabilities. But then we get the question of how we quantify the few/many; where do we draw the line? And as we get more smart/capable humans, the average constantly shifts - what is the concrete goal?

Suffice to say that this is written without emotion, as that makes this discussion the soup it really is: Ethics, benevolence, discrimination, etc., as you mentioned.

I’m now curious, as someone who hasn’t participated in any of the chats, what’s going on?

It’s an interesting thought, one that has crossed my mind a time or two.

I think in reality, we don’t have anything that is “absolute” mind control, but we come pretty close through long-term exposure to biased information (propaganda). You asked for this to be an exception, so I won’t go into details there.
There is a famous study done by Olds and Milner in the world of psychology, where they hooked up rats’ reward center in the brain to some electrodes, resulting in incredible change of behavior. The rats were stimulated by them pulling a lever, and this felt so rewarding to them that they couldn’t think of anything else. After the stimuli was given, they kept pulling the lever to exhaustion, not even prioritizing food or sleep anymore. The scientists also attempted the reverse; to inhibit the reward system. The rats became lethargic, and didn’t have motivation to do anything at all, not even eat.

This is, to much smaller degree, effectively the same that happens with humans that are addicted. Whether it’s to gambling, porn, drugs, gaming, or social media.
So if one can spontaneously create an addiction in someone, you’re one step closer to mind control.

One show that caused a bit of a psychological unease with me was first season of Jessica Jones, where David Tennant makes an excellent performance of a character who can make anyone do exactly as he says. I think this is the kind of mind control that we fear, where we are completely aware of ourselves, but cannot help but do what we have been commanded to do.

Edit:

I forgot to answer your question: Yes, I think it will be invented (and to some degree already has), and total mind control is probably at least 50 years away, as we research the psychological basis that was found with the aforementioned research.

True, but I think if the book is given to the right (group of) people, their curiosity to figure out of the book will likely lead them to it being translated rather fast.

That’s quite the plan - sounds like it could be a good movie (I feel like we already have movies like these, but can’t recall any on top of my head).

They updated the article to provide further context:

Later, in June 2025, the mod’s original uploader deleted it from Steam entirely. In other words, Valve did not remove the mod from Steam (as our original article suggested).

So Valve only restricted access in South Korea, not the rest of the world.

For such mods, there is pretty much always a very firm emphasis on “this is a work of fiction” when starting the game/mod. Example is the Assassin’s Creed games, where they don’t always have historic accuracy, but that’s okay because they have emphasized that this is a liberty they have taken, and they have already made the user aware of it and agreed to the terms.

This mod however (without having tried it myself) does not make any emphasis on this, and hence uncritically portrays it as part of real events.

Здравствуйте все!
I’ve been actively trying to learn Russian for about two years now, and I’m still not very capable of having even simple conversations, due to the great difficulty of constructing sentences in my head. I guess I let the grammar get to me, with all the various prefixes and suffixes, so I choke. That, and the positioning of the words in a sentence. And also the concept of cases (all 7 of them). I know English and Norwegian from before, none of which has this slavic sentence logic/rules, so I find it incredibly difficult to remember/associate words/variations with their use.

I use Duolingo, Babbel, and sometime Rocket Language, in addition to trying to expose myself to having to read/listen/reply to other native speakers, but man am I having a hard time. Any suggestions?

Здравствуйте друг студент! I’ve been trying to learn it as well over the past 2-ish years, and it has proven to be a much slower progress than I had hoped for. How are you faring? And what methods do you use to learn?

Does Actiona suit your needs?

Unsure why you’re getting downvoted (this is “No Stupid Questions”, after all), but I’ll give my 5 cents:

Reason 1:
The people is essentially the reason why a government has power. Without the people (and their support), the government governs a whole lot of nothing, and they will be forced to do labour themselves.

Reason 2:
Poisoning the water is not very accurate, and may lead to both the death of many whom already are supportive of the government (which will create distrust), and people only getting sick depending on the amount they drink (the dose makes the poison).

Reason 3:
Despite a population having a lot of dissidents, these people still work and contribute to society in some ways. It has to get pretty bad before it will be “worth it” to remove them from society.

Reason 4:
Even if it’s so bad that you’re looking at an open revolt against the government, poisoning the water will only really yield MAD, which is usually undesirable.

Ultimately, it’s unlikely desirable for any government to do this, as there are better ways (for the government). However, there have been some attempts at genocide through water supplies before, so it’s not completely unheard of. Check out Project Coast.

Yeah, a bit of an xy problem, I’ll admit. My ultimate goal would be invisible blocking/hiding from certain expected behaviors like the ones anti-adblockers employ. I’m not sure if what I have in mind specifically exists or not, but I find it fun to tweak and experiment with these kind of things. So I don’t necessarily have a problem I’d like to solve, it’s more an ask for directions/experiences.

I have tried Fiddler before, and it almost has the capabilities I’m looking for (it replaces an entire file; nothing granular), but it was a bit of a hassle to get working well last time I tried it, with the CA certificate, decrypting the TLS and stuff.

I haven’t heard of ZAP before, so this is new and intriguing! Thanks!

uBlock Origin I very much like, and I think it’s near-impossible for me to use a browser without it installed anymore. But as far as I know, it’s only used for blocking (dropping network requests) and hiding (CSS-like rules), but no manipulation?

The monkeys I’ve also used a little bit of, but I wasn’t aware that they supported being run ahead of the rest of the page like how I wanted, so this is definitely worth looking into, I appreciate it!
For reference, I found this answer on StackOverflow, which is promising.

I most likely am going a bit to the obscure/convoluted solution, yes.

My goal is to do something to the effect of uBlock Origin, but instead of just blocking/hiding, either replace with local files, or intercept req/res in order to manipulate them favorably, without being detected. I don’t know what uBlock does under the hood though, apart from its resource blocking and CSS-derived hiding.

Example:
Watching a video on youtube, an ad is about to get loaded, but instead of the hiding/blocking strategy uBlock uses, intercept the GET/POST, save the important flags that are uniquely served to your device that would indicate that you have successfully been served the ad, drop the rest, and then answer with what would be a valid response for “I have watched the ad in its entirety”.
So the server basically saying “Here, I give you this page and this script with both vital and ad contents. I now expect you to provide the corresponding hash that these two files will create through a series of functions. If you don’t, I will assume you’re blocking me, and I won’t provide further contents.”, and I’ll simply respond with “Here’s your hash! *wink*”.

Essentially, I wish to experiment with trying to be completely invisible in the blocking, by providing responses as if I have loaded and watched the ad, with all anti-adblock implementations through scripts and dynamic loading “intact” and unaware.

You’re quite right, I should include my goal in the post - editing it in now.

Depends on the conditions, I’d say. If you have an area that has low oxygen and high saline concentration, one could potentially preserve large parts of the carcass. A big challenge though is the substances brought by the carcass itself, like enzymes and bacteria that are not directly exposed to the oxygen-deficient saline-abundant water, which can thrive and remain active for a long period of time. However, if this carcass sinks to incredible depths, where the pressure is really high, temperature is a constant 4 degrees, very low concentration of scavengers or thriving organisms, and potentially sinks a bit into the sediment for a long time, you’ll essentially get pickle juice fossil fuel.

They only recently made it mandatory for three visa types, but since introduced in October 2016, it’s always been an optional field when applying for an ESTA.

Edit:
Not that not providing your social media handle will benefit you, of course.

Do you often (if at all) run into conflicts with the .. alias? I can’t think of any case on top of my head, but it feels a bit sketchy. The more than 2 dots however I imagine is pretty safe.

The big one for me is grep/ripgrep. I’m a dev, so there are often times I need to search the contents of files to figure out where something obscure is mentioned. This is also possible on Windows, but as with most things on Windows, it’s slow.

The second mention-worthy thing is, oftentimes in conjunction with grep, is piping! It’s so enjoyable for me to find the files/content, pipe it to anything (sometimes through xargs and/or tee), so that I can replace the text en-masse with sed, remove all junk files that match a certain parameter with rm, and generally automatically act upon something that I don’t have to manually look for.

Although I’m a dev mainly on Windows, I’ve installed WSL as a compromise, and quite often find myself using its bash to perform tasks like the ones mentioned above.

You’re an awesome admin, Demigodrick! The transparency, the hospitality, the constant positive engagement with the community! As long as you remain, this community will thrive, I’m sure of it ;)