smh

a lot of people are going to die.

Yep. It makes me feel helpless and I hate it.

Side story:

I had the sweetest young store clerk at the grocery checkout. We'd already chitchatted about something, so it wasn't awkward when he shyly asked if I was sick, if that was why I masked.

I told him "no, I'm fine, but my roommate's immune system is weak AF. Oh, and my dad died of COVID and I'm still a bit sore there." and he got big eyes and gave his condolences.

I'd guess he was 14 when my dad died (Jan 2021), when a lot of people's dads died. That's a quarter of a lifetime ago for him. It's been an age. /feeling old and nostalgic

Back when my friends were getting our first COVID jabs, we'd congratulate each other on "a strong immune response" whenever we'd feel crappy afterwards.

Iirc, glasses help reduce infections, too.

Back in 2020 I'd wear my p99 respirator and goggles at the grocery store, then a full strip into the washer and shower as soon as I came home.

Now I'm more relaxed: n95 or kn94 plus standard prescription glasses, washing hands up to the elbow (makes me feel like I'm on MASH). I still strip as soon as I get home, but not because of COVID.

I've gotten relaxed at work over the summer because there were minimal people in the library. I'm going to go back to full masking outside my office now that the students are back, especially since I don't have a new flu or COVID vaccine available to me.

It also twinged my implausibilty meter when they said there were several easy to find podcasts and blog posts on the depths of AiW, but didn't link to any....

Edit: the first, long comment made me think it was some autist's [not derogatory] special interest and that they were too deep to explain it well. The second comment made me think that was not the case.

I'm optimisticly guessing the devices talk to the router in such a way that their mac addresses can't be eavesdropped out of the ether, and there's enough mac addresses in the universe that cycling through spoofed addresses is unlikely to be fruitful.

Though, I could learn a device's mac address by setting up a competing wifi device, possibly by a: having a battery-operated one during a power outage or b: being friendly with my neighbors "sure you can borrow my Wi-Fi".

Now I'm curious how mac addresses are determined (like, is a Pixel 3's mac address going to follow a specific pattern?) and I'm going to go look that up.

Is that bypassable using a spoofed mac address?

What I got out of it (including the clarification) was "AI ties to Alice in some way also Alice in Wonderland is deeper than you think" and the ties to AI were where I felt it was either nonsense or not written for the audience.

Thank you. I follow a tad better.

I don't understand what you wrote. Please explain like I've not take a literature class since high school. (I read, but mostly for fun or computer tech information, which is also for fun.)