Get on Fediverse, get on Urbit, learn how to use FreeNet, I2P, Lokinet and Tor. Compartmentalize your identities. Run all major media platforms from alternative front-ends - such as Nitter for Twitter and Invidious for Youtube. These can be self-hosted too. Use Searx instead of Google - it's many times more powerful if you know what you're doing and you can self-host it as well.
VPN-wise I'd recommend PIA and ProtonVPN- though the former has come under some scrutiny due to recently changing hands. Run your own email server - if it's too time-consuming - Proton and Tutanota are the widely accepted options. If you keep active social media profiles - don't actually visit the website - set it up to send you alerts instead. Same with the news media - use RSS or newsletters. Other messaging app options not mentioned by Curtis include Wire, Tox and Ricochet. Services like SimpleLogin, Blur and Anonaddy can hide your email and Blur can even hide your credit card number(though it'll be compelled to give it out instantly if asked).
If you're in the EU - send everyone GDPR requests. There should be copypasta floating around that can be used as a template. Otherwise, get your data into your local storage and out of their hands as soon as possible. Deleting things does have an effect - storing data is costly, analyzing it even more so. Even if it takes a year for your shit to disappear off their servers - it's something.
Don't use shit like Gab or Parler unless you want every fed and Antifa member at your door in the near future. Also, don't ever, ever fedpost or encourage violence. Don't even insinuate it.
Tell this to every fucking boomer you know. And yes, I was just looking for an excuse to post all that.
Basically take the Luke Smith Pill. Agree 100%, the tools the Snopyta guys have made are great alternatives for those who want to add a mediating layer between themselves and the big internet companies. The greater 'Linuxshpere' has become more stable, easier to use, to the point where maybe 20% of the population have the *potential* to run substantially user-respecting, moderately customized systems. The problem is the entrenched institutionalization of the computer using population.
I remember back in '95, we'd want to play DOOM on a suburban desktop computer, and often had to get an older sibling or parent to load it for us because the damn DOS console was too hard for a normal IQ child to use. Point: 25 years ago, fairly normal adults could handle DOS and buggy, slow Windows 3.1/95/98. Now you have software professionals, who are systems admins or coders by day, still relying on these locked down, unauditable, walled gardens for their phones and computers, slaves to corporate "app" stores. I don't think we're going to break that habit in 95+% of people. Is there space for Linux phones? Will the system *allow* Linux phones?
Paying for your own email domain, so you can move from one email provider to another without bothering your contacts, is a good first step. GMail will support this for $5/mo. However we've seen censorship from DNS registrars so it's a good first step, not a great first step.
Moving the domain to an "encrypted" email provider is a dubious second step. In fact I think I disagree with it. This is a huge amount of cognitive load for Boomers, and solves yesterday's toy problem, which was something like "coordinating pro-Democracy guerilla armies in Egypt," and maybe never panned out. We thought in the 90s that solution would also be relevant to fighting our own inquisitors, but now it looks more like a solution in search of a problem.
The article is different:
- resist censorship, not spying. Protonmail and Tutanota can't work without knowing your email address. Censors will attack your email address by pressuring Protonmail and Tutanota to drop you.
- replace intellectual networks. Email isn't enough. At minimum you need a listserv, one that can't be shut down even if one member defects.
That's not to say purchasing and configuring privacy email isn't good practice. Those who today already don't let Google run their email are the ones who will promote meaningful network stacks tomorrow. Email's great practice because it's already an "open API" with server-to-server federation like the article describes. If you're interested in taking advantage of that today, you're pulled in the right direction tomorrow.
But I don't see how it alone solves an intellectual-networking problem, much less a publishing problem. And I'm not sure I see it contributing to those solutions in a technical progression, just in an affinity among the people seeking for solutions.
I see your point. I guess I was just going for the low-hanging fruit approach, and Protonmail handles pretty much like a normal email service these days. I have to confess though, I'm also worried about shit leaking or getting leaked, so just reducing the amount of data in easy access of the adversary has always been an appealing strategy to me.
"Moving the domain to an "encrypted" email provider is a dubious second step. In fact I think I disagree with it. This is a huge amount of cognitive load for Boomers"
50 years ago, I was committing insurrection at the Capitol (51, actually) along with 500 000 other overprivileged cathedral wannabe applicants. My peers who had not achieved draft class II-S status were far, far away. At 5:30 AM I was warming by a fire set in a 55 gallon oil drum. Standing next to me was Benjamin Spock (yes, HIM). He was BEAMING. "These are my children", he said.
Well, I eventually took up work in the now shrinking reality-based sector, and said goodbye to all that.
From time to time over the decades, I have run into one of these idiots. I don't know who coined the term "silver ponytails", but you catch my drift. Some of them have children and even GRANDCHILDREN living out the hippie fantasy - drug addicts, STD patients - most of them don't have Ayers-scale trust funds.
But now, I turn around, and what do I see - they have taken over the STATE.
But now, as then, there is a hidden hand. When I really started to go off the deep end in 1969, I was fortunate to have a meetup with some local and national leaders of "the movement". Peace? Love? Fuggedabout it.
They were the people who supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They were Maoists. They were pretty good at shapeshifting then, and I'm sure the people running this coup are still pretty good at it.
Everything old is new again in the Biden Spring. The NPR subscribers are weeping tears of joy.
These idiots have nothing. There was nothing ever of value in DC but legitimacy~ and its gone. They have 25,000 troops guarding a big barricaded ...nothing. An old demented pervert and his body servant wander through an empty mansion, muttering promises and threats.
When I think about what's bad about the American extended regime, I think of two things:
*The idea that history has stopped happening
*The cult of work
For the first case, I hold up the capitol rioters as an example. Rather than a cool conspiracy to take over Washington from the inside, they took their phones and filmed themselves conducting a pointless riot. They filmed themselves because they believe that history can't *really* be happening, it has to be conducted behind a veneer of observation and measurement.
The extended version of this is that there's too much "glue" holding everything together, and so nothing interesting and surprising can ever happen. That's why, as a futurist, I find the dialogue surrounding the singularity to be so disappointing. People have been trained to believe that amazing things, like the singularity or indeed the rebirth of Christ, just can't happen because they don't have that film of observation, instantaneously and completely.
The cult of work, on the other hand, consists of the menace of "unemployment" (we have always been at war with Eastasia...) and the glorification of consumption and production. Contemporary unemployment is, in my view, a kind of trickle-down effect wherein there aren't enough good jobs for good working people, and then lazier less competent working people (like myself) have to compete for shit jobs, the competition itself being the shittest part, even though many of us don't need to be molly-coddled by the system and don't want children.
Take Eliezer Yudkowsky's Fun Sequence. This was a series of essays on how an AI could plausibly keep humans entertained, basically. But I find it shocking that anyone needs to be told that. It's the cult of work preventing people from being more like well-rounded people who can entertain themselves and don't need to spend all their time working to be humanely productive.
Also, the dire future predicted by Robin Hanson and his Em economy. Again, the cult of work has pushed out other ideas that would deflate Hanson's evil Ems concept. (For example, what if there's an intelligence trap in the universe that causes excessively intelligent AIs, or people, to kill themselves out of boredom, whereas less stellar AIs and Ems and people find it easier to enjoy life at a measured pace? Or what if there are ideas and "Basilisks" that scare the living shit out of Ems but not ordinary people, again handing the advantage to people who don't want to spend all their time doing miserable work?)
You! Yes, YOU, computer guy; please help! What should my curriculum be to learn how to do computer things. I’m learning Java and Algorithms right now. Next steps? Follow Khan Academy path? Automate the Boring Stuff with Python? I want a theoretical framework that will help my know what my unknowns are, at the very least.
If you want to understand the basics of how computers work: Operating Systems/Networks/Databases. If you want to write code: Data structures/object oriented/software engineering.
Like Curtis, I received le formal CS education, so I don’t know of any good resources for autodidacts outside of the textbooks. IMO there’s no “fast way” without missing out on the foundations, you have to learn the above topics in some depth or you will hit limits and problems that you do not understand.
I would certainly recommend learning Python as it seems to be eating everything at the moment and there's no sign of it stopping. Zed Shaw is a controversial figure, but I find that Learn Python the Hard Way works pretty well as an introductory text. Or you can move on to the next one in the series(don't remember what it's called).
Framework-wise, I suggest you try and obtain some certifications - they're pretty important in IT and will help your career quite a bit. I'm not gonna recommend any, but just do some research and see what's relevant to what you want to do. The standardized material that you need to learn tends to be very helpful in terms of obtaining a basic understanding of the subject.
Coursera has some nice introductory Python courses available for free. (You would need to pay if you wanted the certificate and access to some tests-quizzes.) All you need is a browser. "Fundamentals of Computing" (from Rice University) starts from nothing and gives an introduction to Python itself and some algorithms.
I learned CS the expensive way like others in the thread, but having perused this list, I think there is a lot of value in it, even if I disagree with the order a bit. At the very least, that site has quite a few curated resource lists like that as well as other articles about learning specific CS topics.
Things like edge.network look pretty promising as dissident tech. I think we are closer than we think to a solution(s).
Yes, DNS et al will absolutely be targeted (they already have been, iirc).
Also, going to take a moment to shout out Rod Dreher's Live Not By Lies, great and inspiring dissident material about Christian dissidents behind the iron curtain (even if you haven't 'taken the cross' yet).
This site is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me.
"We have a global CDN that can efficiently publish dynamic web content. You can get access to it by running your own infrastructure and earning crypto tokens for doing that."
-> okay, I'm very interested.
"Everything is wonderful and there are so many possibilities and opportunities and it will immediately solve all your problems."
-> wow, stop insulting me and get to the point.
"Okay, we'll get to the point. We use BGP operating with Strategies to inform routing decisions through Stargates. If you run your Hardware Estate using within-network delivery, you can reduce North-South transport, effectively converting it to East-West transport."
-> you have an obligation to document and explain your technical architecture to skeptical technically-grounded people if you want to be taken seriously, and you aren't meeting it.
If you are connected to edge.network perhaps you can give them feedback that they need to write audience-appropriate documentation instead of Office Space / Pointy-Haired Boss documentation.
- introduce invented terms before using them to explain things. Do not write circular definitions.
- format with respectful density, at least "github README.md"-level density
- the explanation should race toward the conclusion, "the architecture is designed by reasonable and experienced people, and is capable of working reliably and scaling." It should not chase the conclusion, "edge.network is better than anything else you could buy and will unlock all your dreams at virtually no cost. The possibilities are endless!" Are you gypsies and fortune-tellers or craftsmen?
I hope you're right, but can't stop screaming at how triggered I am by this hard-sell crypto-hype web site. It's adopted the style of a pump-and-dump shitcoin (hopefully-)without realizing people only buy those coins as pyramid schemes.
"Maybe someday the government will make Intel make a bunch of backdoored chips—but this doesn’t happen easily." Moldi are you trippin'? Isn't this precisely what the Intel Management Engine or AMD's PSP are all about?
> One day it will be obvious to all that they have failed, and we are up there;
Having grown up in the Soviet Union I fear that such a hope is unfounded. If there was no the successful prosperous USA at the time to look upon and compare - there will be no hard evidence that the system has failed.
And you will not be “up there”, you will be in the city of Gorky, excommunicated as Andrei Sakharov was. M-m hate speech offender registry? no less than a mile to a nearest Internet connection?
Also, "marsupial judiciary" was worth the subscription in itself. If we can just get ads for monocles, it will have beat my one year subscription to The New Yorker hands down!
Get on Fediverse, get on Urbit, learn how to use FreeNet, I2P, Lokinet and Tor. Compartmentalize your identities. Run all major media platforms from alternative front-ends - such as Nitter for Twitter and Invidious for Youtube. These can be self-hosted too. Use Searx instead of Google - it's many times more powerful if you know what you're doing and you can self-host it as well.
VPN-wise I'd recommend PIA and ProtonVPN- though the former has come under some scrutiny due to recently changing hands. Run your own email server - if it's too time-consuming - Proton and Tutanota are the widely accepted options. If you keep active social media profiles - don't actually visit the website - set it up to send you alerts instead. Same with the news media - use RSS or newsletters. Other messaging app options not mentioned by Curtis include Wire, Tox and Ricochet. Services like SimpleLogin, Blur and Anonaddy can hide your email and Blur can even hide your credit card number(though it'll be compelled to give it out instantly if asked).
If you're in the EU - send everyone GDPR requests. There should be copypasta floating around that can be used as a template. Otherwise, get your data into your local storage and out of their hands as soon as possible. Deleting things does have an effect - storing data is costly, analyzing it even more so. Even if it takes a year for your shit to disappear off their servers - it's something.
Don't use shit like Gab or Parler unless you want every fed and Antifa member at your door in the near future. Also, don't ever, ever fedpost or encourage violence. Don't even insinuate it.
Tell this to every fucking boomer you know. And yes, I was just looking for an excuse to post all that.
Basically take the Luke Smith Pill. Agree 100%, the tools the Snopyta guys have made are great alternatives for those who want to add a mediating layer between themselves and the big internet companies. The greater 'Linuxshpere' has become more stable, easier to use, to the point where maybe 20% of the population have the *potential* to run substantially user-respecting, moderately customized systems. The problem is the entrenched institutionalization of the computer using population.
I remember back in '95, we'd want to play DOOM on a suburban desktop computer, and often had to get an older sibling or parent to load it for us because the damn DOS console was too hard for a normal IQ child to use. Point: 25 years ago, fairly normal adults could handle DOS and buggy, slow Windows 3.1/95/98. Now you have software professionals, who are systems admins or coders by day, still relying on these locked down, unauditable, walled gardens for their phones and computers, slaves to corporate "app" stores. I don't think we're going to break that habit in 95+% of people. Is there space for Linux phones? Will the system *allow* Linux phones?
Paying for your own email domain, so you can move from one email provider to another without bothering your contacts, is a good first step. GMail will support this for $5/mo. However we've seen censorship from DNS registrars so it's a good first step, not a great first step.
Moving the domain to an "encrypted" email provider is a dubious second step. In fact I think I disagree with it. This is a huge amount of cognitive load for Boomers, and solves yesterday's toy problem, which was something like "coordinating pro-Democracy guerilla armies in Egypt," and maybe never panned out. We thought in the 90s that solution would also be relevant to fighting our own inquisitors, but now it looks more like a solution in search of a problem.
The article is different:
- resist censorship, not spying. Protonmail and Tutanota can't work without knowing your email address. Censors will attack your email address by pressuring Protonmail and Tutanota to drop you.
- replace intellectual networks. Email isn't enough. At minimum you need a listserv, one that can't be shut down even if one member defects.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150319162726/https://pond.imperialviolet.org/ and onion services are more interesting building blocks than privacy email, in my opinion.
That's not to say purchasing and configuring privacy email isn't good practice. Those who today already don't let Google run their email are the ones who will promote meaningful network stacks tomorrow. Email's great practice because it's already an "open API" with server-to-server federation like the article describes. If you're interested in taking advantage of that today, you're pulled in the right direction tomorrow.
But I don't see how it alone solves an intellectual-networking problem, much less a publishing problem. And I'm not sure I see it contributing to those solutions in a technical progression, just in an affinity among the people seeking for solutions.
I see your point. I guess I was just going for the low-hanging fruit approach, and Protonmail handles pretty much like a normal email service these days. I have to confess though, I'm also worried about shit leaking or getting leaked, so just reducing the amount of data in easy access of the adversary has always been an appealing strategy to me.
"Moving the domain to an "encrypted" email provider is a dubious second step. In fact I think I disagree with it. This is a huge amount of cognitive load for Boomers"
Thanks for thinking of us...
This is quite good.
50 years ago, I was committing insurrection at the Capitol (51, actually) along with 500 000 other overprivileged cathedral wannabe applicants. My peers who had not achieved draft class II-S status were far, far away. At 5:30 AM I was warming by a fire set in a 55 gallon oil drum. Standing next to me was Benjamin Spock (yes, HIM). He was BEAMING. "These are my children", he said.
Well, I eventually took up work in the now shrinking reality-based sector, and said goodbye to all that.
From time to time over the decades, I have run into one of these idiots. I don't know who coined the term "silver ponytails", but you catch my drift. Some of them have children and even GRANDCHILDREN living out the hippie fantasy - drug addicts, STD patients - most of them don't have Ayers-scale trust funds.
But now, I turn around, and what do I see - they have taken over the STATE.
But now, as then, there is a hidden hand. When I really started to go off the deep end in 1969, I was fortunate to have a meetup with some local and national leaders of "the movement". Peace? Love? Fuggedabout it.
They were the people who supported the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They were Maoists. They were pretty good at shapeshifting then, and I'm sure the people running this coup are still pretty good at it.
Everything old is new again in the Biden Spring. The NPR subscribers are weeping tears of joy.
What is the great object of taking DC?
Power?
Well why?
Legitimacy.
Which is gone.
These idiots have nothing. There was nothing ever of value in DC but legitimacy~ and its gone. They have 25,000 troops guarding a big barricaded ...nothing. An old demented pervert and his body servant wander through an empty mansion, muttering promises and threats.
Holy ---- — these writings are like crack. Keep them coming!
When I think about what's bad about the American extended regime, I think of two things:
*The idea that history has stopped happening
*The cult of work
For the first case, I hold up the capitol rioters as an example. Rather than a cool conspiracy to take over Washington from the inside, they took their phones and filmed themselves conducting a pointless riot. They filmed themselves because they believe that history can't *really* be happening, it has to be conducted behind a veneer of observation and measurement.
The extended version of this is that there's too much "glue" holding everything together, and so nothing interesting and surprising can ever happen. That's why, as a futurist, I find the dialogue surrounding the singularity to be so disappointing. People have been trained to believe that amazing things, like the singularity or indeed the rebirth of Christ, just can't happen because they don't have that film of observation, instantaneously and completely.
The cult of work, on the other hand, consists of the menace of "unemployment" (we have always been at war with Eastasia...) and the glorification of consumption and production. Contemporary unemployment is, in my view, a kind of trickle-down effect wherein there aren't enough good jobs for good working people, and then lazier less competent working people (like myself) have to compete for shit jobs, the competition itself being the shittest part, even though many of us don't need to be molly-coddled by the system and don't want children.
Take Eliezer Yudkowsky's Fun Sequence. This was a series of essays on how an AI could plausibly keep humans entertained, basically. But I find it shocking that anyone needs to be told that. It's the cult of work preventing people from being more like well-rounded people who can entertain themselves and don't need to spend all their time working to be humanely productive.
Also, the dire future predicted by Robin Hanson and his Em economy. Again, the cult of work has pushed out other ideas that would deflate Hanson's evil Ems concept. (For example, what if there's an intelligence trap in the universe that causes excessively intelligent AIs, or people, to kill themselves out of boredom, whereas less stellar AIs and Ems and people find it easier to enjoy life at a measured pace? Or what if there are ideas and "Basilisks" that scare the living shit out of Ems but not ordinary people, again handing the advantage to people who don't want to spend all their time doing miserable work?)
I had a brief thrill thinking Viking Buffalo man was going to pick 435 “rioters”, swear them in, and announce a new Congress.
But that would have been too real.
I'll just check if yarvin has a new article before bed... everytime
"Our single focus must be on gaining and holding this high ground of reason and truth."
I will put that on my screen as a constant reminder.
As always, Curtis: I love to read your texts and it encourages me to think about ways to get some of the necessary work done.
It is an honour, Mr. Yarvin.
Catch me at the local Community College studying to reverse engineer Tik-Tok
I KNOW I NEED TO TRY URBIT, YARVIN. STOP MAKING ME FEEL GUILTY THAT I HAVEN'T.
You! Yes, YOU, computer guy; please help! What should my curriculum be to learn how to do computer things. I’m learning Java and Algorithms right now. Next steps? Follow Khan Academy path? Automate the Boring Stuff with Python? I want a theoretical framework that will help my know what my unknowns are, at the very least.
If you want to understand the basics of how computers work: Operating Systems/Networks/Databases. If you want to write code: Data structures/object oriented/software engineering.
Do you have any recommendations as to books/youtube channels/classes in, say, the OS department?
I learned OS from the good old Tanenbaum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Operating_Systems
Like Curtis, I received le formal CS education, so I don’t know of any good resources for autodidacts outside of the textbooks. IMO there’s no “fast way” without missing out on the foundations, you have to learn the above topics in some depth or you will hit limits and problems that you do not understand.
Thank you!
I would certainly recommend learning Python as it seems to be eating everything at the moment and there's no sign of it stopping. Zed Shaw is a controversial figure, but I find that Learn Python the Hard Way works pretty well as an introductory text. Or you can move on to the next one in the series(don't remember what it's called).
Framework-wise, I suggest you try and obtain some certifications - they're pretty important in IT and will help your career quite a bit. I'm not gonna recommend any, but just do some research and see what's relevant to what you want to do. The standardized material that you need to learn tends to be very helpful in terms of obtaining a basic understanding of the subject.
Thank you! Python it is, and I will certainly look at the available certifications!
Coursera has some nice introductory Python courses available for free. (You would need to pay if you wanted the certificate and access to some tests-quizzes.) All you need is a browser. "Fundamentals of Computing" (from Rice University) starts from nothing and gives an introduction to Python itself and some algorithms.
You won’t regret learning C
If you prefer to learn by video, here is a page that purports to be an entire computer science curriculum in 1,000 youtube videos: https://laconicml.com/computer-science-curriculum-youtube-videos/
I learned CS the expensive way like others in the thread, but having perused this list, I think there is a lot of value in it, even if I disagree with the order a bit. At the very least, that site has quite a few curated resource lists like that as well as other articles about learning specific CS topics.
Things like edge.network look pretty promising as dissident tech. I think we are closer than we think to a solution(s).
Yes, DNS et al will absolutely be targeted (they already have been, iirc).
Also, going to take a moment to shout out Rod Dreher's Live Not By Lies, great and inspiring dissident material about Christian dissidents behind the iron curtain (even if you haven't 'taken the cross' yet).
> edge.network
This site is like fingernails on a chalkboard for me.
"We have a global CDN that can efficiently publish dynamic web content. You can get access to it by running your own infrastructure and earning crypto tokens for doing that."
-> okay, I'm very interested.
"Everything is wonderful and there are so many possibilities and opportunities and it will immediately solve all your problems."
-> wow, stop insulting me and get to the point.
"Okay, we'll get to the point. We use BGP operating with Strategies to inform routing decisions through Stargates. If you run your Hardware Estate using within-network delivery, you can reduce North-South transport, effectively converting it to East-West transport."
-> you have an obligation to document and explain your technical architecture to skeptical technically-grounded people if you want to be taken seriously, and you aren't meeting it.
If you are connected to edge.network perhaps you can give them feedback that they need to write audience-appropriate documentation instead of Office Space / Pointy-Haired Boss documentation.
- introduce invented terms before using them to explain things. Do not write circular definitions.
- format with respectful density, at least "github README.md"-level density
- the explanation should race toward the conclusion, "the architecture is designed by reasonable and experienced people, and is capable of working reliably and scaling." It should not chase the conclusion, "edge.network is better than anything else you could buy and will unlock all your dreams at virtually no cost. The possibilities are endless!" Are you gypsies and fortune-tellers or craftsmen?
I hope you're right, but can't stop screaming at how triggered I am by this hard-sell crypto-hype web site. It's adopted the style of a pump-and-dump shitcoin (hopefully-)without realizing people only buy those coins as pyramid schemes.
Apply today to the Dead Link Poets Society - The most *exclusive* poetry club on Urbit - ~walfer-marren/dead-link-poets-society
I've got a new planet going and tried joining your group a few times on Landscape but nothing happened. Maybe your planet was offline?
Yeah I sometimes have to put my laptop away so my 1 year old doesnt eat it...
I will host on TLON when they roll it out, but in the meantime shoot me a message ~walfer-marren and i will send you an invite
"Maybe someday the government will make Intel make a bunch of backdoored chips—but this doesn’t happen easily." Moldi are you trippin'? Isn't this precisely what the Intel Management Engine or AMD's PSP are all about?
He's shilling for TOR, too. Carrying on right along pretending that the "parallel construction" of the Silk Road trial somehow didn't happen.
Tor is mostly a joke. It's not hard to imagine the hall monitors have root access to every node on it.
its urbit guys. time to start up my urbit agian
> One day it will be obvious to all that they have failed, and we are up there;
Having grown up in the Soviet Union I fear that such a hope is unfounded. If there was no the successful prosperous USA at the time to look upon and compare - there will be no hard evidence that the system has failed.
And you will not be “up there”, you will be in the city of Gorky, excommunicated as Andrei Sakharov was. M-m hate speech offender registry? no less than a mile to a nearest Internet connection?
Also, "marsupial judiciary" was worth the subscription in itself. If we can just get ads for monocles, it will have beat my one year subscription to The New Yorker hands down!