You’re broadcasting to family who will likely be using gmail, so what difference does it make? Google will get all the emails either way. Anyway, logical argumentation is completely useless in a personal situation like that.

If you want the address to be stable in the long term, you should probably use your own domain name instead of gmail or proton, if you’re not already doing that. After that, it’s possible to switch the hosting without changing the email address.

Your public key block is a cumbersome thing and it’s enough to just append its fingerprint, if you consider email to be trusted against forgery but not against eavesdropping. The other person can then use the hash to authenticate your key that they get some other way (or they could just ask you to email it).

Back in the day, lots of nerds would have their PGP key fingerprint (32 hex digits) printed across the bottom of their business cards. So if someone got a card in person, they could use the fingerprint to authenticate a key that they later received by email.

Your post doesn’t ask about signing your emails without a good reason, but some commenter seems to think you are asking about that. That can be good, bad, or both, since it means that anyone who gets a copy of the message, including attackers, can now authenticate that the message came from you. Anything that gives attackers capabilities that they didn’t already have, must be examined critically. Dan Bernstein came up with an clever authenticator scheme designed to prevent this exact attack, but PGP doesn’t implement it and I actually don’t know of any software that does.

Finally, at least some of the old-time PGP community now thinks that PGP solved, to some extent, the wrong problem. It not only made no attempt to conceal metadata, but it actually advertised it, in the form of key servers and key signatures connected with keys. Even if the attackers couldn’t read the encrypted messages, they could still tell who was talking to who, which is almost as bad. Remailer and broadcatch systems tried to solve this, with mixed success. A quote by cryptographer Silvio Micali has stuck with me for a long time: “a good disguise does not reveal the person’s height”. I.e. don’t just try to conceal the message contents from attackers while letting them collect other information. Rather, don’t give them ANY information.

It’s possible to get rather “Spy vs Spy” about this type of stuff but it can help you think about security. As always, “Security Engineering” by Ross Anderson is a fantastic book if you’re interested in the general topic of how to be paranoid. Or to quote the proverb, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you ;). The book is here, 1st and 2nd editions downloadable as pdfs: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html

I lose them all the time. Here is what I use now:

https://www.harborfreight.com/safety/vision-protection/safety-glasses/smoke-lens-safety-glasses-66822.html

They are wraparound, comfortable, shatter resistant, cost $2 a pair when not on sale, and go on sale for $1 a pair fairly often including I think right now.

Elastomeric respirator like 3M 6200. It will be more comfortable than an N95 if worn for a long time. But wear an N95 (maybe change them every few hours as they get damp) if you have to. Plane rides are super spreaders and so are airports.

People still look at their up and downvotes

You can turn that off in the UI. I did that and it mostly makes the place more tolerable, though I do find myself peeking sometimes.

If both players have infinite bankrolls, but only one of them is allowed to stop the game once they are ahead, the one with the option of stopping has an advantage. They can play until they are in the lead, then stop. The reason this doesn’t work in real life is that real bankrolls aren’t infinite.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin

Almost all the suggestions here are videos. Who wants light from a screen keeping them awake when they are trying to sleep? Put on some very quiet music instead. Best for me is when it’s something I know pretty well.

What is this thing and who is supposed to care? It looks sort of like Mastodon: is it related?

Well, just don’t date any Java programmers. They will treat you like an object ;-).

As people have said, the keys have to be completely independent of each other or else the layering can make the encryption weaker. And, if you’re worried about one of your layers being weak, you shouldn’t be using that layer in the first place.

I think SSL/TLS actually gained something from this though. The initial key agreement phase generated (from my foggy memory) a “premaster secret”, then hashed it with both SHA-1 and MD5 and combined the two hashes in some way. Those were the two hash algorithms popular in that era. Later on, weaknesses (free collisions) were found in MD5 and even later, in SHA-1. By combining both algorithms, SSL avoided any hint of compromise from those particular hash problems. SSL’s designer Paul Kocher later said he was very glad he had specified using both.

I would say though, that secure hashing (with a public algorithm and no secrets) has generally been considered a more difficult problem than secret-key encryption or authentication. And SHA1 and MD5 both used design approaches now considered dubious.

In Italy even the burglars are literate! Truly a bibliophile paradise!

Um, nothing wrong with dating another programmer if you happen to meet one and things go that way, but it’s better to start out with a much wider filter and be open to whatever might develop.

It seems difficult. The kind of person willing to study such a topic probably already has some skills. Most folks are non-criticial because they like to be that way, so you’re really asking for them to change their personalities.

That said, I liked the fanfiction novel Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality (hpmor.com) despite its serious flaws. But, it is generally the target of intense hate in the regular HP fanfic community. It has its own fandom that is mostly separate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies is a pretty quick read, with links to follow–maybe start there?

I’ve been wanting to work through “Statistics” by Freedman, Pisani, and Purves, which talks a lot about confounders and other mistakes people can make. But, while not super technical, it’s a college level textbook.

Didn’t know such courses exist, and they sound like a great channel to slip in propaganda :). But we search finds free ones if you scroll past Coursera.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=critical+thinking+course

Wow. I’ve seen this exact story (fake Internet person garners wide sympathy right up til tragic death) at least 3 other times with varying details. Two specific ones were “deaf”, I guess to be able to dodge requests for phone interviews. Maybe with voice deepfaking they’ll be able to put that aside in the future.

Smart phones, smart watches, smart TVs, and now this? Give me a break, some things just don’t have to be Internet connected.

IDK what Boost is here, but Voyager and the standard web UI can both turn off the vote display.

I turned off vote display and rarely miss seeing the votes. See also Facebook Demetricator.

I haven’t noticed it but I rarely look at the all communities feed instead of just my subscriptions. I do notice that a lot of users seem to be simply in the tank instead of maintaining healthy skepticism towards politicians. I also keep hearing “foreign disinfo” but that makes me chuckle. Of course it exists but it’s not more potent than the domestic disinfo which is even more plentiful.

Polymarket currently has Harris ahead at 52-45 plus minor candidates. Yeah I think that favors her too much. Trump has been off the rails (I mean more than usual) lately but he could get it together. Also, Harris is a blank slate upon whom many place unfounded hopes.

The TV debates will probably be more significant than usual this year. IDK who they will favor. We shall see.