The other poster gave you a lot. If that’s too much at once, the really low hanging fruit you want to start with is:

• Choose an active, secure distro. There’s a lot of flavors of Linux out there and they can be fun to try but if you’re putting something up publicly it should be running on one that’s well maintained and known for security. CentOS and Debian are excellent easy choices for example.

• Similarly, pick well maintained software with a track record. Nginx and Apache have been around forever and have excellent track records, for example, both for being secure and fixing flaws quickly.

• If you use Docker, once again keep an eye out for things that are actively maintained. If you decide to use Nginx, there will be five million containers to choose from. DockerHub gives you the tools to make this determination: Download number is a decent proxy for “how many people are using this” and the list of updates tells you how often and how recently it’s being updated.

• Finally, definitely do look at the other poster’s notes about SSH. 5 seconds after you put up an SSH server, you’ll be getting hit with rogue login attempts.

• Definitely get a password manager, and it’s not just one password per server but one password per service. Your login password to the computer is different from your login to any other things your server is running.

The rest requires research, but these steps will protect you from the most common threats pretty effectively. The world is full of bots poking at every service they can find, so keeping them out is crucial. You won’t be protected from a dedicated, knowledgeable attacker until you do the rest of what the other poster said, and then some, so try not to make too many enemies.

Correct, horse battery staple.

Like the comment you’re replying to said, it kind of has to go back to either one race is generically inferior, or one race is disadvantaged for other reasons. Any other confounding variables, like income level, go directly back to the same point: If black people have less money, is that because there’s something inherent in them that makes them less capable of making money, or have they been disadvantaged by a system that prevents them from making money?

I don’t think we’re going to fix things in any meaningful way. I think we’re watching a big collapse. Not the end of humanity like some want to predict, but very rough times ahead.

I am with you that we should help each other out, and there’s ways to do that. We can feed and shelter people now, and we should, but much more than that becomes infeasible quickly. And I think it will become even less feasible as things get worse.

I think what the other person was saying is… If there’s a way to fix things, to make things better or at least lessen the harm, it’s going to take a lot of people doing a lot of things. Things that aren’t always profitable right away, but pay off later. Better public transit systems, more renewable energy, huge programs replacing the old but crucial infrastructure that brings us clean drinking water, turning useless land into productive fields, and so much more. If we had the political will, we could offer everyone the ability to work on these programs and in return have a better quality of life, while also building a better future.

And to be clear, this isn’t all manual labor. Probably most of it isn’t really manual labor. It’s math, it’s planning, it’s machine operation, it’s coordinating and transporting, it’s organizing and communicating. To solve our problems will require a lot of people with a lot of skills, and if we can encourage the right people to be in the right place, we could solve so many problems and make so many things better.

We won’t, though. But we could.

I agree but I feel like you’ll almost never get honest feedback, and companies never seem to do anything with the feedback they get. I mean if you’re firing someone, you’ll probably get a list of grievances that are exaggerated because they’re upset. If someone is quitting, they might hold back to not burn the bridge so to speak. The only time I had an exit interview was also the worst job I ever had, and I doubt they did anything as a result of me telling them, “Hey, when you tell someone they can’t take their legally mandated break, and then write them up for not taking that break, it’s kind of a demoralizing dick move.”

Using different apps for password management and for 2fa is good for your security and good for redundancy. If your vault is compromised, you don’t want your OTP info compromised with it. I personally use Aegis.

That said, Aegis is still an Android app and while I have a backup of it’s data, I think I’m still out of luck if my phone breaks until it gets repaired or replaced. I’ve been trying to figure that one out, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of good options with desktop support.

That’s the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn’t.

I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?

In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.

However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.

This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn’t materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn’t really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn’t really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven’t.

These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can’t replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn’t quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.

I genuinely believe AI isn’t over hyped in the long run. We’re going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it’s still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they’re going to be paying big for that mistake.

One time I was at a restaurant and I noted that it didn’t have a changing station. Sure enough, during the meal my kid needed to be changed. I asked my wife if her restroom had a changing station, and she told me it did.

So I took my kid up to the host stand and asked to talk to the manager. I politely explained that I needed to change a diaper but there wasn’t a changing station in the restroom so asked which table I could use, or if I should just use the bench in the waiting area. Manager got flustered and had a waitress check if the women’s room was empty and then stood outside the door while I changed the diaper.

About a year later I happened to go back, and I did notice that the men’s room had a changing table. It’s a small thing, but I felt like I won one.

You’d be dismayed to find out how often I’ve seen people do that.

It was a teenager about two years older who got it from their older brother. Unclear to me if it was shared intentionally or something else. Gross in its own way, perhaps, but not in a grooming way. We met in real life many years later when I happened to be on a work trip near where he lived, had some beers, he showed me around Boston. Nothing untoward happened.

Not my dad, but a friend on IRC gave me a login to a paid hentai site when I was 13. Considering it less bad than regular porn is probably a huge mistake, tbh. I’m not trying to shame anyone for their fetishes or anything, but I would have been perfectly happy with boobs and instead got a bunch of comics with fairies having sex with insects.

It’s been a long time but I recall a study featured on Freakonomics where a national park tried different signs to get people to not steal rocks. Signs like, “Taking rocks hurts the ecosystem” and “Taking rocks is a crime.”

The only effective one was something along the lines of, “A million people visit this park every year and leave things alone.” Suggesting that telling people to do the right thing is less effective than peer pressure.

I knew healthcare was messed up but I legit didn’t know how messed up until it happened to me. My daughter got put on a specialty medicine because of a relatively rare kidney condition. It had to be compounded, because she is a small child but the medicine only came in adult doses.

Aetna denied coverage, stating I had to get the medicine from CVS (which is owned by the same parent company of Aetna). CVS does not compound medicine, so we couldn’t get it from them. I spent almost a full year on the phone arguing with them and around $6000 paying out of pocket before I was able to switch insurances.

I consider myself reasonable. Even in a functioning system, mistakes can happen and need to be resolved, and I spent the first month or more assuming this was just an innocent mistake. What got to me was the total lack of recourse. Day after day on the phone with people, some of whom genuinely seemed to care but could do nothing. They intentionally separate the patients from the people making decisions so that all the decision makers get is a few fields in a form, not the whole story. The people in charge are even more separated so they never have to hear anything about the people they’re screwing over. And if I couldn’t afford the extra $6000 burden, I just wouldn’t have gotten the medicine and in the best case she would have spent that year in and out of the hospital and in the worst she wouldn’t have survived the year.

I tend to think most people are decent. But the system we’ve built makes sure to separate people by impenetrable layers of bureaucracy to ensure that the decent people either can’t do anything or never know there’s a problem, while the indecent never have to be confronted with the damage they do. It’s insane.

I think about this sometimes but the challenges for direct democracy are very hard to overcome. To vote right now, you go to a place and someone verifies your identity and then you vote on a machine that should theoretically have not just your vote but some form of backup to ensure your vote is counted.

Obviously this would get really obnoxious if you were voting constantly. So something like change.org maybe where people can propose things and others can vote on them. But now how do we handle identity verification, and ensuring only one vote per person? On something connected to the Internet, how do we verify security? This needs to be even more secure than a bank, as every hacker and government in the world will want to sway the results.

We could maybe distribute something like a USB key to cryptographically ensure everyone’s identity, but then you will need to handle people losing theirs, or theft, and it wouldn’t work great with cell phones. There’s other identity solutions like scanning documents or facial ID but they have their own security issues and also are a nightmare for privacy.

I dunno. There’s probably a solution out there that might work, but it would take a lot of work to make it trustworthy and that work would largely be overseen by people the system is meant to replace so they aren’t exactly incentivized to get it right.

I was in a position like this once. The first two or three months were great. TBH, I mostly played video games and cleaned the house. It felt like free money. By the six month mark, I quit to go to something else. It’s surprising how mentally draining it is to just do nothing.

I think I took two things away from that experience: One, I think people generally have an innate need to produce something. We don’t want to just sit around and entertain ourselves, we want to contribute. Two, I think the 40 hour work week isn’t quite the right balance. Maybe 30 would be better.

I think of it exactly in terms of the trolley problem. The whole premise is that if you do nothing (don’t vote) more people die. By flipping the lever, fewer people die but you’ve taken an action that leads directly to their deaths. The philosophical question isn’t just “is it better for fewer people to die” but “in pulling the lever, are you directly responsible for those deaths?”

My answer would be that inaction is itself an action. In this scenario, you have found yourself responsible either way. Suppose you pull the lever, though, to save as many lives as you can… Wouldn’t the ones who die as a result of this have loved ones that absolutely do blame you?

As a nerd, I don’t expect my parental control settings to work forever. They’re more there to prevent childish naivete from getting them into trouble, they probably won’t stop dedicated teen horniness. And I won’t even be mad, figuring out how to get around them requires learning more about how technology works.

Because it’s probably bullshit. Elon Musk is a colossal problem, so people feel justified in whatever lies come to mind.

• The Cybertruck has steer by wire BUT NOT BRAKE BY WIRE. No other Tesla has any such system. The brakes in all Teslas are traditional.

• The question of who pays when you have an accident with autopilot has basically been settled in court: the normal rules of fault apply. If autopilot is at fault, then you’re at fault. If you’re in control, and you’re at fault, then you’re at fault.

The idea that an insurance company says, “Oh, we won’t cover it because you deactivated autopilot” is outright silly. Ignore the autopilot thing for a second. What happens when you rear-end someone? Your insurance covers it based on your coverage, and your premiums probably go up significantly.

The driver was supposed to be in control, of a vehicle with traditional brakes, and hit a car. If they have coverage, it should be handled just as if autopilot weren’t involved at all unless they can prove that Tesla is at fault.