• 16 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: March 28th, 2025

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  • I always find these articles being so popular in western social media weird and subtly braggy. It’s like the Lyndon Johnson quote about about making white feel better than black people so you can rob them of whatever. Such a distraction that makes people feel like we’re better than them/at least we’re not them. Yet pretty much every trend I’ve seen about Chinese ennui was at the time true of Americans and western Europeans just articles being written about the ennui would not be mainstream for a couple more years. Like minimalism during the financial crisis or recently quiet-quitting in the US were celebrated in US social media as great workers movements that are positive social movements and a sign of cultural strength while lying flat in China in US social media is a sign of societal decline. Whatever either is, it’s the same shit. It’s always weird exoticism to me. You don’t get popular articles about youth expectations about young people in Romania or Greece


  • Some years ago there was a documentary called Mayor about the mayor of the de facto capital of Palestine. I remember they had mediators from like Germany in the negotiation for the Palestinians to build a cemetery and the Israeli negotiator and German mediators telling the mayor that he needs to compromise and satisfy the Israeli demands. Some compromise.

    The gist is that there wasn’t really a compromise to be made. The Palestinians wanted to build a cemetery in their city so people could have a place to bury loved ones and the Israeli military that say these people are free and independent are saying no to the people to build a cemetery for non-specific reasons.

    There wasn’t anything the Mayor and the people of the city could do to be able to build a cemetery and not be attacked by the Israeli military that had in years past invaded and we’re occupying. It was more like they didn’t want anything built for the local population at all. They were effectively living in captivity with no real self-governance. Freedom could only be had in lands away from their home and that very well may have been the purpose. Before this direct genocide, the method in cool periods was to make life miserable for the native people’s to push them out for Israeli colonizers




  • I’ve reviewed code, in particular I’ve looked over merge requests on occasion but mostly out of academic interest than being very concerned over security. Just want to see how people accomplish a task. Learning.

    I’ve monitored network traffic just because sometimes I just want to do that rather than paranoia. Practice and learning.

    I’ve run code through a local sonarqube instance and whatever other scanning software I feel like trying along with building applications from source but again it’s not from paranoia but for personal interest that’s mostly just making sure I’m in practice of being able to do so.

    I’m not a security professional so I don’t have the background and experience to really notice things that can be problematic like people I know who have a career directly cyber-net-etc-security related rather than my tangential

    So really I don’t audit code. At least not huge codebases. When it’s just a few 100 line files of python to accomplish something, I’ll read them. There’s usually a requirements.txt in there though pulling in pip packages and I know I haven’t audited up the dependencies. At work there’s standards handled by people where it’s their job to determine whether the code you’ve written and dependencies pass the minimum to be deployable to computers on the network and that too is mostly handled by security scanning software both open source and closed commercial software




  • Reading this stuff reminds me of earlier in the 2010s when Iranian weapon systems press releases were always met with mockery, I live in region with heavy military tech development companies. I had a feeling back then that progress is progress and eventually they’ll be at a point of close enough to make the risk calculation too high for the US to operate so far from production/maintenance compared to whatever country is the current target for invasion/bombings and their weapon sources. I think we’re getting to that point

    Operate and lose equipment that cost a billion+ to make equipped with ammunition that are hundreds of thousands to millilions of dollars to resupply that also need to be serviced for extended periods of time and major parts replaced after only a few uses. Parts of the US intentionally let costs run away. Whether they thought the technolical advantage actually made a justifiable enough difference for the poor production rate and maintainability cost is another question


  • 100% numerous people in the US military know that they’re sitting on extremely expensive ships/aircraft/vehicles that are with modern enough weaponry, easy to destroy. A question of whether they have the power, for enough time required, to fix the bloat

    Difficult and expensive to develop, manufacturer, maintain. Trapped in service contracts with completely single source suppliers, no alternatives. If it wasn’t so expensive to maintain, even just the ammunition, maybe it wouldn’t be such a panic situation but well after pretty much constantly being at war since the countries inception, the US is sitting on an albatross of a military. Not just all the equipment but how much employment is tied to supporting the albatross. Albatross multiplied hard with Iraq and Afghanistan paired with all the tax cuts since Reagan. Without Afghanistan and Iraq, probably wouldn’t be so wallet concerned for for a good amount longer










  • That’s on you. Why would this be any different in user behavior? It’s just a difference in underlying tech architecture

    Socially it sounds like you want to be an asshole user but don’t want to put in the effort to be an asshole mod or an asshole server admin. Of course you running into assholes constantly is also very likely a personality flaw on you rather than others



  • I’ll keep an eye on this. Maybe even sub for minimalist usage. Currently use Proton Unlimited and probably at around ~200GB usage for storage and active use the VPN and email. But something fediverse is more interesting to me. I doubt it can suitably replace Proton for me now but it’s at least cheap. Nice to see cloud document/office stuff. Proton still doesn’t have a Linux sync application so that’s a weakness. Less sensitive stuff I’ll use Firefox sync for passwords but that Chrome web browser integration I think is a major feature for the Google ecosystem

    I know a lot of people are opposed completely to crypto but for privacy services I would prefer paying with crypto. I prefer numerous options but I generally think Monero should be the minimum. Maybe trocador.app to support more. I will probably sub with a credit card to check it out and support though





  • I’d have to read more to see if I had any faith in its potential, article paywalled for me.

    In my experience with friends, family, and coworkers when people show me crazy loony shit, it’s a YouTube video or a podcast. YouTube was always the #1 crackpot incubator but I think podcasts have passed up Facebook at #2. I don’t know what goes on in the lands of twitch.tv and if that gets categorized as social media and does it even matter since you don’t need an account to view

    For a while I thought of Reddit as regularly trading position with 4chan as an anglosphere mass shooter’s favorite social media

    Not long ago I finally saw clips of early 2000s Alex Jones 9/11 conspiracy vids. They were like the crazy stuff you’d see a coworker going off their rocker would start showing people on YouTube. I think I’d expect crackpot peddlers to adapt faster than government regulators for how they reach mass audiences


  • Maybe it would have been better received 10 years ago but I don’t know about being beloved like the elder scrolls or fallout games. 10 years ago was Fallout 4 but even in Skyrim era, it’d be great graphics but without the wonderful whimsy

    Starfield is too normal. Bethesda games excel when they take the weirdness of the world seriously. Starfield is too serious conceptually. Elder Scrolls, just the concept of everything being canon because of dragon breaks and other weird aedra/daedra/chim/godhead shenanigans lets writers write wild while it still fitting in as serious in universe

    They’ve managed to do that well enough with Fallout even though it’s supposed to be alternate reality world. Still wacky even if not as lore interesting as TES

    Starfield is too unimaginative of a sci-fi universe so far. It’s too normal and because of that, they can’t write whacky in a way that people buy into and love. So then they end up judging the game by its systems and mechanics and technical merit way more than they do elder scrolls games or fallout.

    Also base/ship building is given too much focus for a single player game. These games aren’t pretty enough to be a single player game that gets beloved for base building like Animal Crossing