Seriously. How do we have all these soft, weepy, unprepared children in charge of our countries?

Where’s Winston Fucking Churchill when you need him?

Haha I just noticed your name, that’s a funny coincidence. But yeah I’m a big fan of Debian in general. The problem, as you noticed, is often it doesn’t have great support for the latest hardware. On the other hand, it often has great support for older hardware, and PikaOS refuses to install at all on some of my older, less capable systems, so those are running Debian right now. So it’s kind of a “right tool for the job” sort of situation. They have their purposes, it’s definitely not one-size-fits-all.

I think that’s a fair and reasonable, but maybe somewhat optimistic point of view. I certainly hope it might be as smooth as a “long hard process” of hardworking participants that takes decades.

I’m concerned it’s going to be much worse and more dramatic than that. If it’s sufficiently dramatic, it might be even faster than a decade. But we don’t necessarily want the change to be that fast or dramatic, because that has serious costs, and I think that might be the path we’re on. I think there are inevitably going to be a lot of super hostile actions from many different sides, and these will manifest as a collapse or near collapse of human civilization. I don’t see any realistic path forward through traditional or existing systems or models of economics and governance. I think empires are already falling. I think many nation-states are going to topple. I think there will be a massive reorganization of human society in the coming decades, and that will happen largely through widespread war, famine, brutality, and savagery that we had convinced ourselves we had left long in the past. Even though it’s never actually stopped happening at any point in time, it’s just been marginalized and isolated into places we mostly ignore and when we do notice it, we soon have to look away and start to ignore again because it’s so upsetting to us. When we see it happening, we find ways to do something to convince ourselves that it’s been solved, or managed, or improved in some way and then we look away again so we don’t have to think about it when it inevitably gets worse. But even having it marginalized is better than it has been, and there’s no shame in that. But we still will have to confront these realities eventually. And I think eventually is quickly becoming “now”.

This is what humanity is, this is what any remotely objective view of history tells us. We have often tried to be better as people, and that’s commendable, and I think we have done a good job being at least somewhat better for a long time, and that too is commendable, and it is obviously a worthy pursuit that we should continue, but we cannot completely escape that we have our dark sides, we are capable of great evil, and great evil is being done sometimes directly under our noses, sometimes we do it ourselves without even seeing it, it is part of us, it is part of who we are and who we always have been. And I think we are facing down a serious confrontation with many of our great evils right now. And I don’t think we’re prepared for how bad it’s going to be. For how bad we can be.

Maybe I’m wrong, I hope I am. I hope there’s some turning point where everyone simultaneously realizes where this is headed and everything changes direction and we address many of our great evils and solve many of our problems peacefully and promptly and continue pursuing our better selves. But I’m finding it increasingly hard to believe that’s realistic.

This is a common misconception I think. “Stable” from a development point of view (which is what Debian is) is not the same as “Stable” from a user point of view. It can be, as long as no other variables are changing. But a typical desktop user IS a variable, and they change other variables all the time. “Stable” makes sense on a server, where the server has a defined role and a specific purpose that basically never changes. It’s “stable” and if the OS is also “stable” that gives you assurance that nothing is going to break unexpectedly… ONCE you have it tested and set up properly to be stable in the first place.

But installing on a fresh system where you’ve never run this OS before is the antithesis of stable. You are initially in an “experimental” state, and you may need the latest updates and patches to even be compatible with the hardware you’re running. Then you’re going to use this system daily, downloading stuff, installing new apps and tools regularly, changing configurations when you feel like it. None of this is stable. And that’s fine, it’s not wrong, it’s just the reality of being a user with a desktop system. It’s not stable, it’s not supposed to be. It’s your daily driver.

To paraphrase George Carlin, a bad driver, driving a safe car doesn’t really make you safe, at all. First, learn to drive THEN get your safe car. A stable distribution like Debian is for people who already know how to find all the compatible-by-default hardware and do the configuration necessary to make things safe and stable and using Debian assures them that once they have got it into that state, Debian isn’t going to undo their work and make unexpected changes.

For users, especially on the desktop, you often want bleeding edge latest updates to fix these kind of compatibility issues as soon as they’re identified, even without absolutely rigorous testing and validation that it won’t mess up someone’s “stable” configuration. You really do want the opposite of “stable” development, in order to make your own system more stable as quickly and reliably as possible in the circumstances. It will never be as stable as Debian running on a server, but that’s normal, and expected. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Debian is a good OS, but as a desktop user, on your main system, it might be counterproductive. For what it’s worth, I run PikaOS, which is a gaming-focused distro derived from Debian (Debian’s stable foundation is a huge asset for people building distros on top of it) but provides prompt access to all the latest updates and patches needed for gaming and includes configurations and drivers for supporting the latest consumer level hardware and all the common tools and things that power users want, that are becoming popular day by day. This is the opposite of “stable development” but it’s perfect for a desktop system in my opinion and they do a great job.

Sometimes I’m able to get around it by tweaking some ublock permissions, but once I was surprised to discover that changing my user-agent with user-agent switcher seemed to do the trick. It’s really strange. Cloudflare’s captcha loops are inscrutable.

Misleading title. A “U.S. ban on Bambu Labs 3d printers” is not nearly the same thing as a “U.S. ban on 3d printers”, yes there’s a plausible interpretation where the title makes sense but I guarantee they knew exactly what they were doing with the more obvious misleading clickbait interpretation.

So, Tiananmen Square it is, then?

It’s not going to get resolved overnight, and it’s not going to be a smooth and direct road without any violence or suffering, we’ve seen plenty of the violence and suffering already. There will be more. But pay careful attention to the resistance that is forming, keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to resist, and until those opportunities present themselves, do what you can to make yourself and your families, loved ones, and communities more resilient and better supported. Give as much as you can, until it is time to take what we are owed.

There are protests happening. There will be more. There is active resistance. There will be more. There is civil disobedience. There will be more. There are people forming labor unions. There will be more. Labor strikes are planned. There will be more.

Don’t despair, prepare. It’s almost certainly going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better… but it will get better. Even if it takes years of effort, and maybe even a lot of violence and suffering to get there. The USA is the country that threw a tea party to overthrow a king. They will do so again, sooner or later. And keep in mind that historic event, also, did not happen overnight, it was the culmination of years of public anger, organization and preparation. It doesn’t even have to be a single definitive event. The stuff that is happening in Minneapolis right now, is changing the balance point on the scale. It may not be what tips it over, but it doesn’t have to be. The undercurrent of change is always moving even when it’s not visible. When it becomes visible, it usually gets pretty dramatic pretty quickly.

First we need to trust-bust the government until we get a government that is actually representative of the people, not representative of the wealth.

It’s not that the government is not capable or as inefficient as they are so often portrayed. They are actually quite capable and frighteningly efficient. They’re just not working for us anymore.

Maybe if we combined more investment and infrastructure like this for smaller and more remote communities, while promoting more remote work opportunities and scrapping pointless back-to-office mandates, we could start to make housing not just more affordable, but also allow people to live in housing they actually want to live in, detached homes with yards and communities, not shoebox condos in a sea of other anonymous humans. Small towns and villages need a renaissance, and unlike many places we have the the luxury of having more than enough land to be able to do that without being forced into a single-minded pursuit of urbanism.

There’s nothing wrong with urbanism and city life, but it should be a choice based on preference, not a choice that economics increasingly forces of people into against their will because they can only get jobs where they have to commute and work downtown for no reason or because they can’t afford any other style of living.

I hope we’ll make sure of it. If Gaddafi can receive proper justice, anyone can. Putin was apparently particularly worried about Gaddafi’s fate, which is quite reasonable for him to be upset about I think, given his own circumstances. We can only hope he’ll be at least as capably deposed someday.

Yeah it’s pretty clearly Medusa/Gorgon-inspired. Obviously, it has its own unique twist, as it should, and probably includes aspects from some other references as well (Scylla, Cyclops, and the Hydra from classical mythology, and various Lovecraftian and Science-fiction tentacle/blob monsters that were common throughout the 60s and 70s) but the basic imagery and functionality is too similar to a gorgon to ignore that there’s likely some connection, whether conscious and intentional or not.

Elections are overrated anyway. Even if there are elections going on, they’ll be confusing and inconvenient to get to, and the scary news will make sure you don’t want to risk showing up to the polls, that sounds like a really dangerous thing to do in this day and age. Even if you don’t go, the media will tell you in advance who is going to win either way, so you might as well just let them go ahead and report whatever vote totals they want.

VPS/VPN and seedbox are not really the same thing. You don’t really have to maintain a seedbox. they’re managed rtorrent instances. Some of them, at the higher end, might be full VPS and support VPN but most of them only have at most a handful of installable addons which are again completely managed for you, especially at the lower end. The $9/month option here has wireguard support so if you’d really rather upload directly from your local connection because you’re sure you have the storage and the speed then that is an option, so go for it I guess.

But that’s really defeating the point of a seedbox anyway. Seems silly to me that you’d really want to do all that uploading and seeding across your local connection, but if that’s your goal, then I guess that’s your goal. I’m not trying to stand in your way, just trying to make sure everyone’s clear on understanding how a seedbox is supposed to work.

Do what you gotta do, no shame.

However, you might find it’s more affordable and practical to rent the cheapest seedbox you can find, then you have basically unlimited bandwidth for seeding, and you only have to worry about downloading from the seedbox once using your local connection.

Even if you only rent one for a few months, you could use that time to build up lots of ratio or bonus points that you can use for freeleech or escaping from hit-and-run penalties.

Yeah I’m not OP (and I’m not offering this service to the public) but anything I’m ever hosting for anyone else should be zero-knowledge encrypted. I don’t want to be able to know what’s in other people’s data. THAT makes me uncomfortable. As long as it’s encrypted, and I don’t have the key, it’s just random bits as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t care what you use your random bits for. None of my business.

Is this the USA’s Kristallnacht? I guess historians might get to decide someday.

Krita is always free and open source, supported by donations and the community. It’s not a trial and it’s not time-limited.

Voting for fascism is never the right choice. Even in a two-party system, everyone still has the option to not vote for either Kang or Kodos. “Throw your vote away” is always a valid electoral choice, and perhaps in some cases, the only morally defensible one. We even happen to have a still marginally viable third party, and even if all your vote is doing is keeping that third choice barely alive on the margins, that has its own form of validity too.

Strategic voting is the opposite of strategic. It’s a short-term, single-election tactic that will result in a strategic collapse in the long term. You do not ever have to vote for one party to prevent the other party from getting in. That is not your responsibility, and if you do that, it’s not going to ever get better. You are sacrificing the future for the present, and the present is fleeting but the future is forever. We have to think longer term, or we will have absolutely no recourse when both of the top choices end up being unconscionable.

If you annoy .ml users, then I like you.