All Russia did was give a nudge to the literal trillions of dollars in capital held by elites who wanted nothing more than full-blown fascism. All the Kremlin had to do was finance whoever could sow the most distrust in democratic institutions and wedge themselves in existing divides within the US. It’s the most boring coup in history, people voting for Hitler not because of Bolshevism of whatever but because they’re triggered by fucking vaccines and pronouns.

Conversely even if the EU went full hybrid warfare (which we aren’t because we can’t even do anything about the open fascists in our own Union), the counterplay is rebuilding trust which is harder by orders of magnitude than just buying up a social media, deleting moderation, and promoting the Nazi stuff.

Best we could hypothetically do is sanction y’all into autarchy and hope the subsequent recession/depression acts as an electroshock to the population, but you’re already doing it to yourselves and besides I see no reason why the two thirds of y’all who either don’t care or actively support fascism would change their minds. It will be just like Putin Orban or Erdogan, 15 years from now shit will be worse than ever for the 99 % but Republicans will still win elections without even needing to cheat much thanks to their complete control over state propaganda. Your democracy is dead, you should be moving through the stages of grief and planning your next move.

I’d love to be proven wrong but there’s too much historical precedent, and zero precedent to Americans being even remotely close to politically conscious enough to engage in “forceful” political change (unless the force is being exerted on Black people, then the “well regulated militia” comes out the woodwork). Hell, the videos from “protests” I’ve been seeing this week in your major cities look so pathetic it makes Denver look like a large village.

The EU stopped using increasing amounts of power around 2010 despite continued economic growth (yes, even if you account for imported goods).

Not that consumerism and the exploitation of the global south aren’t existential tragedies for our species, I’m just pointing out that while capitalism does require never-ending growth, it is interesting to note that it empirically doesn’t require ever-increasing power to do so.

Fascism is a byproduct of capitalism but unrelated to energy prices. Doesn’t matter if gas is 1€/L or 2€/L when Musk, Murdoch, or Bernard Arnault decide what gets voted, printed and shown on TV.

Also English is an odd germanic-romance bastard child that Western Europeans tend to like because it has a decent number of cognates for everyone and a simple grammar IF you’re only aiming for simple conversational English. The barrier to entry is quite low, especially if you don’t give a shit about having a thick accent and straight up mispronouncing tricky words (as anyone knows who had a conversation in English with a non-fluent Italian/Spanish/French person).

OTOH German used to be relatively widely spoken in Eastern Europe, and Slavic languages also use declensions AFAIK, and also even post WWII German held quite a bit of momentum in academic circles.
So if the Soviet block had gone the Chinese route and become an economic behemoth instead of withering and dying at the dawn of the Information Age, German being the lingua franca (or at least giving English a run for its money) would have been a distinct possibility IMO.

Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.

Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.

Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.

Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.

The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).

That’s what happens when you woke out and become more focused on arguing instead of coding

Comments are gold lol. You heard it first here folks, Rust is Woke.

Having talked to people who were in charge of making some strategic decisions regarding a business messaging application…

Slack/Discord is “too complex and confusing”. Apparently the pile of unsorted chats, group chats, and meeting chats, are superior to Discord’s threading model.

Also corpos literally do not notice that teams is slow as molasses which is a big part of the friction. You could show them a perfect demonstration that Teams’ UI is so much slower to react to anything (nevermind load the actual resource) than the competition and that they often have a 1000+ms audio RTT in meetings (not a hyperbole) and the business people would be like “yeah, I guess? Who cares?”

Corporate types literally can’t understand that bad audio and audio latency costs a huge percentage of revenue in lost productivity because everyone’s constantly talking over each other and simultaneously being too afraid to speak because the audio delay makes it impossible to fit into a lull in the conversation and also everyone is in a competition for the tiniest shittiest mic with the worst noise canceling that somehow stacks on top of Teams’ pretty bad noise cancelation such that their voice is being noise canceled and you’re just left with like 1.2 kHz of actual range and somehow everyone seems fine to spend their entire day listening to that and aaaaaaaaa I have a headache and I want to die

Then after work you get on a discord call with the mates and everyone is crystal clear with no noticeable latency, even the students on a secondhand 30 € gaming headset.

Hell, pass init=/bin/yes and you’ll see even more greatly reduced RAM usage!

❯ ps aux | grep /usr/lib/sys | awk '{print $6}' | sed 's/$/+/' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/+$/\n/' | bc
266516

So that’s 260 MiB of RSS (assuming no shared libs which is certainly false) for:

• Daemon manager
• Syslog daemon
• DNS daemon (which I need and would have to replace with dnsmasq if it did not exist)
• udev daemon
• network daemon
• login daemon
• VM daemon (ever hear of the principle of least privilege?)
• user daemon manager (I STG anyone who writes a user daemon by doing nohup & needs to be fired into the sun. pkill is not the tool I should have to use to manage my user’s daemons)

For comparison the web page I’m writing this on uses 117 MiB, about half. I’ll very gladly make the tradeoff of two sh.itjust.works tabs for one systemd suite. Or did you send that comment using curl because web browsers are bloated?

For another comparison 200 MiB of RAM is less than two dollars at current prices. I don’t value my time so low that I’ll avoid spending two bucks by spend hours debugging whatever bash scripting spaghetti hell other init systems cling onto to avoid “bloat”. I’ve done it, don’t miss it.

Yeah. What kind of GenAI would be so shitty to render something with so many artifacts, yet coherent enough to render 24 words that perfectly map to their direct French translation? But somehow the pictures are half jumbled to the point that the picture of a tail looks like a circle? Which is the opposite way GenAI normally jumbles things, text is always the first to become undecipherable.

The only way for this to be GenAI would be with close supervision, it’s not impossible but at that point it would have been much less effort for a much better result to edit English text onto an actual French children’s book.

Anyway who gives a shit but the superior attitude of the people here who think they are so clever pisses me off lol

On the one hand, deanonimization attacks are never entirely avoidable on unhardened targets and this one isn’t particularly sophisticated and leaks relatively little information.

On the other hand deanonimization attacks are always bad and it’s a good reminder to people of the risks they are taking. This is also slightly non-obvious behavior, even if it makes sense to the technically competent, as something like an IP grabber normally requires user interaction such as clicking a link. It’s also a vector that CF might be able to mitigate by patching the ability to query a given cache directly.

His anti-war stance such as… trying to incite a war with Iran, only failing to do so because his generals didn’t cooperate? Those same generals he now is going to get rid of because he hasn’t forgiven them for it? That anti-war stance?

The only times he’s anti-war is when it pisses off Obama and/or makes Putin happy.

1. Don’t infantilise him. He’s not attention-starved, he’s a Nazi.
2. Did everyone forget Trump already did that during his first term??? I am going absolutely insane. We know he will threaten to nuke anyone and everyone. And right now the odds aren’t looking good that he won’t actually do it. That’s my call. Nuclear war. People called me crazy in 2020 when I called Trump a fascist, and my worst predictions will be proven right again because everyone seems to be dead-set on downplaying the actions of these Nazi lunatics and acting surprised when they pull through with a Nazi promise which only emboldens them.

My Audi typically displays the outdoors temp on the digital dash, which is convenient. Except when there is any warning light on, which takes its place. Want to take a quick glance at the temp? Well right now it’s “low on windshield wiper fluid” degrees outside.

Also why the fuck does this shitty dash scream at me about warnings when I get in the car but not out. By the time I get home I will have completely forgotten about the windshield wiper. How is “also display reminders after shutting the engine off” not the obvious implementation?

The algorithms used to “derank” swear-laden videos on platforms like TikTok and YouTube are the exact same one used to derank “political” content and/or queer content.

So yeah, it fucking pisses me off every time someone self-censors to appease the Algorithm, lending it more credibility.

Not very high on our very long list of items on the Descent Into Fascism checklist, but it’s on there.

Which versioning???

somekey: yes

Go right ahead and tell me what the YAML version is and what is the type of somekey is. Oh that’s right, it’s impossible, because the versioning is entirely up to the serializers for some godforsaken reason.

Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.

What? I’m not privy to RedHat/IBM/Google’s internal processes but they are all massive FOSS contributors at least some of which I assume are using Agile internally. The Linux kernel is mostly corpo-backed nowadays.

The development cycle of FOSS is highly compatible with Agile processes, especially as you tend towards the Linux Kernel style of contributing where every patch is expected to be small and atomic. A scrum team can 100% set as a Sprint Goal “implement and submit patches for XYZ in kernel”.

Also agile ≠ scrum. If you’re managing a small github project by sorting issues by votes and working on the top result, then congratulations, you’re following an ad-hoc agile process.

I think what you’re actually mad at is corporate structures. They systematically breed misaligned incentives proportional to the structure’s size, and the top-down hierarchy means you can’t just fork a project when disagreements lead to dead ends. This will be true whether you’re doing waterfall or scrum.

Don’t worry.

It won’t take a century for Florida to sink.

I buy my filet américain at my local grocery store. It is made of a beef/pork mix (the fancier the more beef) and usually has an expiry date of T+2 days thanks to the added preservatives.

Industrially processing raw meat is perfectly doable, much to the Americans’ utter disbelief. Belgium has entire specialized industrial supply chains for the massive local demand of raw ground meat bread spread.

One of these literally shows a dead soldier in a field of flowers so, yeah.

It’s idle longing. I could give up my career, move to a deeply rural area, and break my back doing menial jobs until I die of health complications at 64. I won’t, but it’s nice to long for the imagined simplicity sometimes y’know?

See also:

Any source on any significant amount of children wasting time talking to AIs, or just anecdotes and a bad case of “youth these days”?

The whole concept smells like fringe NEET 4chan-adjacent behavior. LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection, and anyone who would project companionship onto these soulless computer programs obviously has preexisting and severe mental issues (relying on AIs to fill a void in human connection is certainly unhealthy but a symptom, not the root cause).

The potential market for these AIs will never be any bigger than the market for anime waifu body pillows, because it’s same audience, different decade. Literally everyone else thinks AI girlfriends and body pillow waifus are weird as all hell, and that’s not going to change because neurotypical people want and need human connection and can tell the difference between a rock with googly eyes and a friend.

Also arguably a rock with googly eyes has more charm and personality than Zuck’s horror show.