CIRCLE WITH A DOT

I'm still impressed [depreciative] by this configuration, dang

holy fucking butt jesus. what year is this.

yeah I can see why everyone just sign commits with SSH keys now

As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft board office was always locked. There was no padlock to replace, as they had done at a draft board raid in Philadelphia a few months earlier, and no one in the group was able to pick the lock. The break-in technique they settled on at that office must be unique in the annals of burglary. Several hours before the burglary was to take place, one of them wrote a note and tacked it to the door they wanted to enter: "Please don't lock this door tonight." Sure enough, when the burglars arrived that night, someone had obediently left the door unlocked. The burglars entered the office with ease, stole the Selective Service records, and left. They were so pleased with themselves that one of them proposed leaving a thank-you note on the door. More cautious minds prevailed. Miss Manners be damned, they did not leave a note.

amazing

the techniker ist informiert technique

@anathem in this case it's specifically taking David Franklin Slater as a case study and generalising him as an archetype. no implications about other real or imagined people named Dave are intended

btw cops do this stuff on you all the time to get you talking and fish for incriminating material️
do not assume "interrogation" is something that happens in the interrogation room, or that it's obvious things like asking you questions. they'll try to hit you at the emotions (false accusations, false offers of empathy, ragebaiting etc.) when you're vulnerable at a waiting corridor, in the GeSa, kesseled, anywhere basically.

like, you want to find Dave. Dave is way more common than you would think. most enemy groups will have a good crop of Daves.

n.b. pay attention to Co-Conspirator 1's artistry here. it's *not*, as lots of people wrote online derisively, that Dave is somehow totally clueless. no, dear Dave is "my secret agent", "my special informant", he knows what's up—and then immediately after: how was your meeting? how's your important job? what do *you* think of this secret information, love? (you're such an expert! you have access to all this classified info, that proves you're special!)

Dave has this hot Russian agent all over him because his job is so real and important, he's living in a goddamn spy thriller right now; and how much more spiritually satisfying is that, compared to being a random mook barked at in the office room! life under capitalism is a void in the heart, of course he would try to stretch that fantasy life as long as he could, no matter what the critic in his head said. Co-Conspirator 1 is not a blunt instrument at all, she's finely crafted for the exact purpose. when you study her, compare her technique here to that of ASMR roleplay videos; the trick is to keep them in a suspended state like, I *know* she's just performing a role for the leaks/patreon rn, but also maybe she developed real feelings for me…?, but no she's just pretending to get the goods, but she's so nice to me specifically, what if… until they don't care anymore about whether the sugar is real or artificial, they're just craving the next hit of sweetness.

this is honeypotting but the same principle works for other forms of scamming, not necessarily *literally* seducing them, but also metaphorically with the promise of getting rich or strong or healthy or spiritually ascendant etc.

what are some more con artistry techniques

1. make your mark believe they're an accomplice, that they're in on the scheme.
2. present vulnerability and ask for help (people unconsciously increase their trust of people *they* have helped, more than you trying to buy reciprocity by helping them, which is too obvious)
3. shamelessly validate them, smile a lot, praise a lot, make them feel special. don't be subtle. look at what LLMs do to people with nonstop praise.
4. spam to pre-filter and find the weak links. don't waste time trying to con the wary, locate the good marks. (e.g. phishing uses blatantly fake emails on purpose, because anyone responding to a misspelled message from a Saudi prince is more likely to be a doable target). if you're trying to infiltrate the secret nazi chat group, for example, find a casual low-ranking member who's lonely and eager for a good friend and doesn't care about opsec, like, approach random men at the rally and chat a bit and ask for their instagram, keep track of which ones have unsafe social media and seem forthcoming with information. then ask *them* to join the group.
5. shut up and keep them talking. validate everything they say. sound interested.
6. shamelessly honeypot.
7. find the gap in their soul and shamelessly promise you can fill it. interact always based on emotions, not logic or facts or arguments; how were they feeling when they said this? what do they want? what emotions will they feel when I send this message?
8. sell high to make them feel in control. float some 100% outrageous proposals that you know they'll deny; with each "no" they'll grow more secure you're not a threat. plus, the 50% outrageous proposals will feel like a compromise.
9. project confidence at all times, act not just like you belong, but act like they're lucky to have you there.
10. go for the long con, while keeping them focused on the short con. give them little wins at first.
11. gradually introduce absurd alternative realities so that they feel like, only you and me know the truth, you're cool you know what's up (cult/conspiracy techniques)
12. appeal to their circle of empathy (running a crowdfund to get nazis to do legal support to a fictional white woman on trial for saying a racist slur, for example)
13. be a slot machine (give them some sugar every so often but without rhyme or reason, so they get hooked on contacting you, rather than you chasing them)

(please don't do this sort of thing to anyone who is not an enemy. con artistry is like pointing a gun, the morality of it depends entirely on who you point it at.)

@mynameistillian so lesson #1 in con artistry is that you don't tell your mark you can sell a plot in Mars, you tell your mark that you know some suckers that *they* can sell a plot in Mars to. you make them feel like they're part of the scheme. you pyramid.

this way, not only your mark will absorb the damage for you, not only they will do the hard work for you, but they can't even complain about it. what are they going to do? tell the cops they were trying to scam someone and their accomplice ran away with their share?

the actual scam in NFTs wasn't "get a sucker to pay money to own a digital drawing." the actual scam was "you and me, my friend, we're going to get *so* much money getting suckers to pay money to own a digital drawing. lol look at these stupid cryptocats my team made up, dumb kids are going to go crazy over these with their parent's credit cards, it's going to be the next cellphone addiction. get some now for cheap and resell them before the scheme's up lmao".

everyone buying NFTs thought they were going to resell them to a mark at some point before the bubble popped. of course they were the actual marks.

cryptocurrency markets work the same way, every mark thinks they're an evil mastermind about to cash out before the bubble pops, but the house always wins. the Metaverse was the same, they were never selling to end-users, they were scamming bosses and capitalists who 100% thought they would very soon be able to profit from renting "digital real state" as soon as they got the dumb consumers to be into the virtual reality; any day now. (but gen-"AI" is a pretty different type of scam, which is why it's been more enduring.)

@0xabad1dea I too enjoy Shōjo Kakumei Utena