Slotos

Please reflect on the fact that until you joined the discussion, we didn’t talk about equating success to luck.

Afterwards, you will likely notice that your jackpot argument reinforces mine.

Millionaires often worked for their money. Billionaires often worked for their first millions too. Problem is, difference between a billion and a million is about a billion.

On the other side of the argument, the amount of people that work harder and smarter than any given billionaire and have nothing is simply staggering. If it wasn’t down to luck, they’d all be billionaires.

So yeah, it is dumb luck. Randomness is not uniform, and someone ends up being close to the time and place of a local spike.

Sourcehut. The answer is sourcehut.

You don’t even need an account to submit patches, just configure git send-email.

I described a route to spoof DNS root authority that Russia and China can use already. Single root is not an advantage, it’s merely a different kind of implementation with different attack vectors.

When it comes to security, it is better to have multiple different implementations coalesce at a point of service delivery, than have a single source of truth. If everything is delivered via DNS, there’s your tasty target for a capable adversary. If there are multiple verification mechanisms, it’s easier to tailor an attack for a specific target.

I want cryptographic infrastructure I rely on to be the last resort for anyone capable of dealing with it.

You gotta love confident statements that don’t stand to scrutiny.

DNSSEC keys are signed in the same recursive manner SSL certificates are. If I, as a government, block your access to root servers and provide you my own servers, I can spoof anything I want. It’s literally the same bloody problem.

Chain of trust doesn’t disappear just because you use a new acronym.

When it comes to regulations, intent doesn’t matter when they enable abuse of power.

I don’t give a fuck if this is not aimed at spying. It trivially allows it, and that’s what matters.

I mean, Comic Code is pretty damn good.

They are left to the fascism, that they equate everyone who doesn’t agree with them, in a very special way - both are ultra right, but tankies are on the left of a spectrum orthogonal to the one the rest of us usually employ.

Oh, I’m not an academic, just an ADHD poster child. Historic weapons keep appearing on my radar for the past few years and I repeatedly find myself spending time on researching what I’ll never practice.

I try to find and share sources for that reason - they allow others to skip incorrect assumptions I made along the way.

By compete I mean to compete in utility and general use, not in a duel. Fencing sword is of no use when you get whacked at the back of your head. It’s also relatively useless on a battlefield, from which I presume it occupied mostly the same space the clubs did - streets and roads.

I won’t argue on weight distribution influence. Sharp object balanced near the handle doesn’t need much of a swing to render my arms unusable. A mace simply cannot do that, its utility lies elsewhere.

PS: I would love to see a skilled fight using a thrusting sword and a mace. Thrusting swords don’t have a cutting edge, which makes it possible to grab and grapple them aside. I imagine the moment your opponent grabs your sword and swings their club presents quite a pickle.

For example, https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.1589

It being from 16th century, it’s likely the heavier variant for cavalrymen (which the description kinda confirms). Even then it weighs only 1.6kg.

Some sword examples:

• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.1600. - 1.76kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.686 - 1.6kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1974.58 - 1.62kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1974.59 - rapier, 1.48kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1919.69 - 1.06kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.698 - 1.28kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.1099 - a very interesting case of 600g of weight
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1974.57 - 360g

Note the years and descriptions on the lighter swords. They are more of an everyday tool for civilians at that point. A regular club competed with those, probably very successfully.

Maces tended to be lighter and shorter than equivalent swords.

Maces aren’t as good against unarmored opponents, because unarmored opponents bleed and get incapacitated from a few well placed cuts. Swords tend to balance their weight closer to the handle to offer precision to make those cuts.

Maces specialize in delivering nearly the entire energy behind a strike. They were balanced to the tip of the weapon for that reason. Which is great against cut resistant armor due to energy transfer. Note that this places maces utility well before invention of plate armor.

If it’s heavy and slow, it’s not a weapon. Slow weapons kill their weilders. Rare armor rendered the user so slow as to let you swing in a game-like “lumberjack dealing with a stubborn log” fashion. There are plenty demonstrations around that show how fast and deadly an armored swordsman is.

The statement about spears indoors is game logic. The variability in spears and swords designs is such that most swords and spears would be equally dogshit indoors, but those that wouldn’t would all work quite ok. In a narrow, defensibly built passageway, thrusting attacks are nearly the only attacks available to combatants. A short spear then can offer a good deal of utility that sword wouldn’t, and vise versa. Short maces are nowhere near being useless there either.