I couldn't sleep last night so there's got to be a better title

Alice and Bob (and maybe even Charlie!) want to find common preferences. However, they're each ashamed of some of their preferences.

Each are only comfortable with another knowing a preference of theirs if that preference is shared by everyone at the table. They also don't want gossipy Mallory to run a third-party check for them - this has to be possible without trusting anyone or any program with access to the secret data of others. Assume Alice and Bob may be tempted to try and find each others' secret preferences.

For example:

• Alice likes Anime, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance, Thriller

• Bob likes Anime, Drama, Horror, Romance, Thriller

• Alice is worried Bob will judge their interest in Anime and Fantasy

• Bob is scared Alice will judge their interest in Romance

• But both are fine with the other knowing if they are both interested.

Both will discover a mutual interest in Anime and Romance, but Bob will never deduce Alice's secret interest in Fantasy.

I am interested in both same-room mechanical solutions (such as overlaying sheets of paper with non-preferences painted out, then shining a light through the stack) and online client-server solutions where the server cannot figure out each answer (such as being given an unlabelled ordered set to compare, where Alice and Bob each have the labels - like return {1,1,0,1,0,1,1} AND {1,0,1,0,1,1,1}).

HARD MODE: no rewd words

My cousin, through work, has access to the search history of a Fortune 500 CEO and noticed it was full of exactly what you'd expect: searching a liquor store site for their most expensive wines, private jet bookings to small private islands, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, we all knew that! I'm not talking about luxury experiences and displays of power.

But what are the strange parts that regular people wouldn't guess?

For example, someone on reddit recently posted that their job is to duplicate a wealthy person's home items across multiple cities. Clone their house meticulously so their boss just travels with a phone. It's pragmatic but egregious.

A friend of a friend makes some useful equipment, and after ordering one of their items, I realized I have some concerns.

1. This is a tool that will be breathed through (like a short tube, just for regular air) and PLA microplastics are microplastics. I assume coating with a food-safe craft resin should minimize the risk of deterioration or leaching of any additives/dyes if the filament isn't food-safe. Let me know if that assumption has problems.

2. Ideally, the appearance would be midnight black and highly glossy, at least from a metre away. That said, I don't want to sand it because I don't have access to a workspace, I don't feel comfortable releasing microplastic debris into the air or water just for a small tool, I'm not contaminating my living space with it, and a respirator is an additional cost for a small, one-time project. Will glossy resin alone give a decently smooth appearance on top of unsanded 0.15mm?

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Whether it was explained differently, or a foundational bit of knowledge made it click, how did you finally understand?

No politics – I'm thinking along the lines of math/programming, language, crafts, etc.

I have a few spare glass bottles and want to explore what decoration I can make with them, without just painting outside them.

Preferably safe, in case of an accidental breakage or leak. Preferably indefinite shelf-life.

Some ideas:

• Density layering experiments ('rainbow in a jar', maybe suspending an upside-down toy boat in a dense clear liquid with a blue watery liquid on-top)
• Phosphorescent liquids to glow in the dark (pref with no UV lamp needed)
• The oil+water+antacid+food coloring lava lamp, but the effect is probably too short-lasting to have running for a few hours

Let's say, I sit down in a mall, open my laptop and connect to a secured mobile hotspot. Then I do it again next week after a reboot. What information would a nearby shop or a passive malicious hacker be able to find about my device? Does my device send out identifying information before joining, like a MAC address? Is this persistent, or randomized?

I intentionally haven't specified a distro, so if something only applies to some network managers, give some details.

Bonus points: what about Android phones?

I'm not pointing at the post this links to, or the reply I've linked to, but the surrounding context, including replies from the moderators telling them they're not welcome.

But seriously, I haven't seen this problem (since Wolfballs died), and it's probably because I rarely look at All instances or scroll to the bottom of huge threads. Or maybe .ml has blocked where these bigots hang out? I really don't know, just guessing here.-

I recently discovered the Banana Ball exhibition baseball games, and their custom ruleset, featuring limitations, crowd participation mechanics and special roles among other things.

This reminded me of (and it's an derivative game rather than an alternate ruleset) Three-Sided Football, which, among other things, is a Situationist, philosophical and sociological rabbit-hole.

I also recall dark chess, a chess variant with line-of-sight mechanics, to emulate the fog of war. There are thousands of chess variants stretching back a thousand years, this is just one of the first I learned of which really interested me.