/If/ it was meant to be a joke. It can easily have not been one: it can easily have been unaware and/or insensitive of the expressed four points and more - many people are (see the diffusion of the "nothing to hide" stance). The content you called "absurd" is pretty literal.

The unawareness of the importance of privacy even as a cautionary stance is spread even in the learned, some convinced that we live in a riskless fair world of free thought and expression without consequence - there are people of prominent intellectual profile vocal against online pseudonyms, for example. There are political representatives proponents of the end of online anonymity.

So, no, when somebody makes those statements about child abuse and drug trafficking, they may not be joking.

Build yourself intellectually in a similar way, and you will reason in a similar way, and consequently express yourself in a similar way. Do not restrict your work to technical matters, which not only would be like training one leg and leaving the rest of the body to atrophy: good intellectual keys come from everywhere, and especially from good creative literature. The earlier the better for the plasticity.

For the rest: do not abuse the assumption of good faith. There are other places than HN to abuse informal attitude.

Edit: for both cases, replies to secondaryacct and yourself: you do have the rule about assumption of good faith in the guidelines present, don't you?

In that case: it was not swallowing but digesting, and it was not one dictionary but very many, in many languages. But it is not the dictionaries to change the linguistic use: the literature and the intellectual keys acquired from all areas form the capacity for complexity, shape that complexity and its expression (so, for example, more mathematics than philology). The "dictionaries" (the research about language) come later in the process of verification of what you absorbed initially less consciously.

Now, this thread was about computing devices, branching towards security, privacy and its importance - not linguistics -, and your comments may be interpreted as intellectual curiosity as per the rules, but can more easily be interpreted as a mockery - as already mentioned. I am open to questions, but I think it proper for that to happen in a different context.

Sometimes that is felt, but abilities compensate the friction - emotions settle on trust, which is good coin.