Sunglasses alone are not enough either. Modern face recognition tech is way better than just distance ratios

Are there any AES countries without mass surveillance though? Honest quesion.

There is no effective technical solution for political problems. If you find one, it will soon be outlawed or rendered ineffective (eg if you wear mask and sunglasses, prepare to be harrssed by law enforcement). Lobbying to stop unconstrained surveillance is the only option.

My relationship with antinatalism is very complicated.

First off, I personally will not be procreating, for multiple reasons.

Chief among those is the fact that I live in an ever worsening capitalist, patriarchal, xenophobic hellscape; even socialist countries are a long long way away from anything resembling communism, still require a lot of labor from their citizens in exchange for basic necessities (with good reasons), and patriarchy very much persists there. I have hope that we as a species can overcome this eventually, just as we mostly overcame slavery and achieved some semblance of emancipation for many oppressed minorities.

Another, more permanent reason: despite my relative privileges, my own experience of life has been very mixed, and I perceive there to be more suffering than happiness. Suffering is just a way for our body to push our brain to do something the body needs to survive; human beings have a lot of needs to be met, and as long as there are at least a couple that are not you will suffer (not accounting for things like drugs or other extreme dopamine hits which come with their own set of issues). Another big issue is how our bodies normalize the level of suffering to their environment; this is good because it allows us to get by with very little without going insane, but on the flipside even if you have all the basic needs met, the body is always demanding more via suffering. You can observe this by looking at rich people: even though their needs are met with seeming abundance, they crave to experience more and different pleasures, and suffer in the process of trying to achieve them. While frivolous, I think the suffering they experience is still real and similar to that of our own. I don’t feel any compassion for them (after all, for most of them their wealth was stolen from less fortunate), but it’s a good example.

As such, I personally don’t want to bring a new being into this world, mostly to suffer their way through life.

However, I also know for sure that different people experience life differently. I know that people with much worse material conditions than mine perceive themselves (and thus their life) to be overall happy, despite there being plenty of suffering too. I don’t know whether it’s a genetic or learnt trait of their psychology; in any case, I think those people are more likely to produce offspring who experience a happy life, and wish them the best in doing so. My hope is that they bring up their kids in the right way - both so that they are happy, and also able to eventually overcome all the issues in the third paragraph.

Yes, she actually joined recently - I hope she starts posting too, her art is great and more people should see it. Not giving a handle for now because she’s shy.

Addendum: if we were to do the split right now, we might also see the rise of a few virulently and openly fascist countries

sooo the US but smaller and less powerful? sign me up

Are you using ncdu or ncdu_2? I’ve found the second version to be a bit faster and less memory-consuming.

I don’t know if it’s of any solace, Linux used to be a much more… ahem… “involved” experience a decade or two ago. This was more-or-less the norm:

I can’t really say what the newcomer experience is nowadays, but I can say for sure that even in the worst-case (as it was in the times when I started using it), after a couple months of furious issue-fixing and trying new things, you will eventually settle on a setup that works for you. Some people actually get addicted to all the problem-solving and start looking for more issues to fix; some start distrohopping to find a “more perfect setup”, getting their fix of issue-fixing in the process. If you’re not one of them, congrats, at that point you can (mostly) just continue using it, until you need to update your hardware, then process may or may not be repeated depending on your luck. If you really hate fixing issues twice, you can look in the direction of declarative distros like NixOS or Guix, but I will warn you that the two-three months of furious hacking is still very much a thing here, but after that you’re set more or less for life.

NIX IS FOR REPRODUCIBLE BUILDS. That’s fucking it, seriously. It’s literally on their website.

This post is specifically about NixOS and friends, though.

IT’S A HORRIFIC EXPERIENCE FOR NEW USERS TRYING TO RUN A DESKTOP. Steer clear.

There are thousands of users who run NixOS on their desktop, and thousands more users of home-manager (or nix-darwin) on macOS. If you are ready to put in the time and learn how it works, it’s wonderful - your entire distribution, the thing through which you interact with computers, becomes just another project in your ~/projects, rather than something you have to manually configure. You can’t forget “how to configure $X”, because it is all recorded in one place and done automatically when you get a new machine or update or whatever. It’s GNU Stow on steroids, for your entire system.

There are a lot of downsides for sure as well (mostly the learning curve, and having to fix the buggy bullshit in some software which only runs well in FHS), but if you are a software developer (or adjacent) and like Linux, NixOS is still awesome.

For context I’ve been using aerc as my email client for a while now, and was looking for something similar for calendars/tasks myself

I’ve tried:

• calcurse: fine but clunky, also a bit difficult to set up. The most mature option and probably the best one available, but I just couldn’t get used to the interface
• calcure: similarly clunky interface, glitchy/blinking rendering to the point of being headache-inducing, lacking features (couldn’t figure out how to look at all event attributes?)
• khal: limited in features (compared to calcurse) and slow when there are a lot of events (even when it’s only 2-3 per day), also there are some rendering bugs sometimes. Probably the most intuitive and clean interface of all, and good scripting opportunities.
• gcalcli: only Google Calendar (I also need support for arbitrary CalDAV), didn’t investigate further
• plann: no TUI as such, just CLI

A couple weeks ago I’ve decided to start writing my own. It’s still very much a hacky WIP but I’ll update in this thread if I ever decide to publish it. In the meantime, I hope one of the above works for you!

GitLab: a lot of cool features, well-integrated, polished. Downsides: resource hog, open-core model (some features locked behind a paid license when self-hosting)

Forgejo (the thing that powers codeberg): it’s federated & lighter on resources usage. Downsides: some features still missing/in development

Well shit. I will still self-host sourcehut because it’s so cool from a technical standpoint, but now with disgust for its author

To be fair, systemd also fixed a bunch of issues (by making the boot sequence declarative and also consolidating a bunch of previously disparate services into a cohesive ecosystem); it also introduced new ones which are now difficult to fix due to compatibility. I still prefer it.

There’s no need for the middleman in this scheme. Instead, a much simpler solution would be:

1. Website A gives you a randomly generated $TOKEN
2. You go to Government and ask it to sign something like The person with $TOKEN is of legal age. You have to provide your ID or whatever here, but the government doesn’t know who made the token.
3. You go back to website A, it checks the signature of the message and lets you through

This can be automated in some way; maybe with a browser extension or some referrer-less redirect sort of thing.

It’s still fundamentally shitty though, because now the government pretty much knows that you want to watch adult stuff, it just doesn’t know which adult stuff exactly.

A better (but almost impossible to implement) solution would be for the government to issue everyone a smartcard as an identity document (many countries already do, but without the following features). On that smartcard is a private key, with the corresponding public key signed by the government. The smartcard can then sign any $TOKEN with true statements about you, e.g. The person with $TOKEN is of legal age, or The person with $TOKEN is called $NAME, or The person with $TOKEN has a driving license, etc. You have to connect it to your computer in some way so the website can talk to it, but it should be trivially doable with almost any modern smartphone. This way, everyone has the ability to attest stuff about them without the government being directly involved.

The reason this won’t work is because it would be quite expensive to do and would take a long while to implement.

Sure, just highlighting the similarities here.

The article is clearly mostly manipulative bullshit. The arguments about “incompatibilities” between uutils and coreutils being used as an “extend” strategy is just bonkers, the point of uutils is to be a 1-to-1 compatible toolset, and there’s no reason to doubt the developer’s intention there. Even if they do introduce some extra features, most software projects that actually matter will not be using them, because compatibility with coreutils will remain important for decades to come.

The kernel of truth hiding in there is that Rust’s “preferred” licensing under MIT/Apache is indeed a problem, and it should have been GPL (or at least MPL) everywhere from the beginning, especially for libraries. This is probably the worst aspect of Rust indeed, but not enough to outweigh all the awesome technical parts of it.

I’m from Russia just for context. The playbooks are exactly the same down to the justifications (“protect the children” for destroying online privacy and anonymity, “terrorism” for arresting any unfavorable protesters).

I’m not only talking about this, also about the age verification thing and the talk of a VPN ban.

I think UK and Russia are on a similar level of gone, TBH. One is more queerphobic, the other is actively destroying its social safety net. One is directly involved in a shitty imperialist war but with relatively restrained civilian casualties, the other is funding and aiding a fucking genocide.

And I don’t think Russia will be invading NATO any time soon. Russian military doesn’t really have the resources to pull it off right now, and I don’t think Putin has enough years left in him for the country to recover enough to do it.

UK right now is giving me some serious Russia 2018 vibes (except even worse because this brand of authoritarian bullshit aligns with the US). I suspect if things go in this direction and there is no revolt of some sort, UK might start a dumb special military operation somewhere. Oh wait there are already helping to genocide palestinians. Maybe this is actually Russia 2022 vibes 🤔

Yeah, but also the price of a coin is a reflection of how much people “want” it, which increases liquidity, making it easier/cheaper to finalize your transfers. It’s a tradeoff as usual. E.g. with Bitcoin, you can find people willing to exchange cash for BTC and BTC for cash at exactly market rates, making your losses for a transfer equal the transaction fee. I don’t think I could do that with some random memecoin.