Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Yes. The institution in question is human society. We generally grant the permission to make rational decisions over our lives to other humans who know better that we do or are more skilled than we are.

    Sometimes, yes, those humans turn out to have been deceitful or dishonest, but there are mechanisms in place for when that happens.

    And yes, sometimes those mechanisms are wilfully avoided by the deceitful. Politicians and rich people are especially good at this.

    Guess who’s pushing “AI”? The thing that has no contract with human society and cannot be held accountable. And neither will the people pushing it.

    This is why we should have as little to do with it - at least as it is in its current form - as possible.


  • Tangential advice: Many people use YouTube (and formerly Twitch until they nixed it) as a place to store videos. As in the only copy of a video is hosted there.

    If your videos are precious to you (or you think they’re going to be), make arrangements for them to be at least stored elsewhere, if not hosted. That’s not going to be cheap what with hardware prices going through the roof, personally or third-party, but it is necessary because no host is both trustworthy and permanent.

    Actually not even self-storage is as trustworthy and permanent as we’d like, but it’s still better than any alternative for data retention.

    Also, donate to your chosen Fediverse host(s) if you can.





  • It’s not necessarily about “the government”, well it is, because governments often contain, or may come to contain, bad people, but they shouldn’t be the only concern.

    It’s about not making it easy for bad people to interfere in your business, even if what you’re doing is all legitimate and above board; and not making it easy for bad people to harm you or those close to you either.

    Mobile telephone numbers aren’t strictly a secret, especially those on monthly contracts. Names and numbers are linked in a provider’s database somewhere. But for an untrusted third party to know that information? It’s bad enough when someone who needs to know it sells it on to a telemarketing database. Imagine what would happen if any old crank got a hold of that.

    Likewise we all have real names, home addresses (for the lucky majority anyway), etc. There are people who know these things. Perhaps even people we’d rather didn’t, but it would be incredibly stupid to leave that information in plaintext for anyone else to find, especially if it can be linked to our online activity.

    You might be the most fair and balanced Internet user in the world, but if your name and address is public, any crank who takes exception to you anyway will be at your door shouting and raving before you know it.

    If we have to give it over, presumably to a trusted individual or organisation, we need a method where it can’t be intercepted. So it’s either a slip of paper at a clandestine meeting place or you need encryption to send it over the Internet.

    There’s plenty of other personal information that I haven’t mentioned here where similar rules will apply.



  • As I’ve said before, once Linus is gone, we might well end up with splits at the kernel level rather than at the distro level. And we would be wise to avoid any one organisation’s stock kernel, even if there are some very large organisations providing a lot of code for the kernel at present.

    I can see a future where, say, GNOME, start producing their own kernels to support their vision of the Linux desktop from the ground up.

    And it’s all but certain that Canonical and Red Hat would be very interested in things going their (respective) way(s) when the time comes.




  • Tricky prospect. If they admit Australia on that criterion, they’d have no good reason to not admit Israel if they asked to join, and that’s a can of worms I don’t think Europe would want to open. Best leave that can at the back of the cupboard.

    Now, if we could find some other criterion, I don’t see why not. Sticking it to Britain by accepting all of the Commonwealth except Britain could work as an argument, and might even be popular on the continent.

    It would have to be couched in cleverer language, of course, for the sake of plausible deniability.