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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Due to the people involved, Parler is almost certainly not a honeypot setup by the FBI, CIA, or some other government organization. However some of the details that have leaked out over the last week made me wonder how little of the site would have changed if that was the intended purpose.

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Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Hah, this is great. If you don't get the references, it's Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity") plus Arthur C. Clarke's "3rd law" ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")

Apparently it's called Grey's Law: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Grey%27s%20L...

Does that make it a "quotemanteau"?

Wait... Is that a thing? Are there more of these?

I vote for "quotemanteau" to be officially sanctioned! But I would say the specific case is merely a snowclone[0] of "any sufficiently X is indistinguishable from Y"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

It appears to have the properties of both in this case.

That is to say it's a snowclone where the substitutions come from another quote.

I guess quotemanteaus are a special kind of unique snowclone.

You could take "with great power comes great responsibility" and form the snowclone "with great X comes great Y" and then take the quote "the medium is the message" and use those in your snowclone to make the quotemanteau "with a great medium comes a great message"

Hmm... I feel like I should try concoct more of these. They're fun.

Thank you for the explanation.

More like, sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from common incompetence :)

It's pretty well demonstrated that Three Letter Agencies really like enticing idiots people into fantasy situations well above their competency in order to generate terrorism convictions so it's always a possibility even if there's no demonstrable third party malicious action

And in this case there is demonstrable malicious action.

It would probably have been more secure.

this is true "female body inspector" shirt clientele though

they would have required authentication for their api calls if that was the case...

Besides that, probably not much. =)

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