In the short (next couple lifetimes) term, the US will continue receding from different geopolitical arenas, followed by some political jostling to change that region’s power balance.

As the empire shrinks, the politics of scarcity will become more pervasive, entrenching clientelism and mistrust in an already fairly low-trust society.

It’s not a hot take to say that mask-off fascism is on the menu given how fascism-shaped the US is, but given how autocanibalistic this particular right wing wave is, I have no idea what to expect.

Don’t know whether the new boss will be the same as the old boss; while India and China don’t seem particularly empire-inclined, few countries do until they’re the one with the biggest stick. Both have been drumming up nationalism internally for the last decade, so if they can’t defuse it safely they’ll point it at each other, to everybody’s detriment.

Regarding the solution: does 1.4 work fine once you’re in the OS?

It’s important to remember that the actions of the working class are primarily derived from their class interests, not because individuals are dicks. Humanizing even shitty individuals is an important part of persuading people away from thinking in terms of individual people and more about the dialectics of class.

Buy a second hand laptop or computer. Lots of companies sell off their tech shit after 3 years, and they have at least a good decade of use in them.

Look at what models are super popular second hand like ThinkPads; you’ll be able to find replacement parts pretty easily.

Absolutely, the fact that every time you interact with a person it could be on the worst day of their lives, but for you it’s just Tuesday is a massive contributor to mental health issues. Being unable to talk about it makes things much worse, and while the ethos like ‘killology’ and similar might cops less traumatized by their jobs it is definitely for the worse.

The amount of othering I hear from cops who talk about the people they interact with in their jobs… Well let’s just say I’ve never heard a cop talk about their job and go “boy am I glad that person is on the force”, and it definitely seems like at least partly a coping mechanism.

I think there are a few reasons, firstly while conservatives put many issues within society under a mental health umbrella, they simultaneously make no efforts to fix this problem and in fact actively make it worse since poor housing access, wealth inequality, healthcare access, food access etc are all major factors for pretty much all mental health issues. There are only a few explanations I can come up with for this:

1. ‘mental health’ is a smokescreen; it’s an umbrella so vague and monumental an issue that it gets put in the “I can’t affect this problem, so there is no point in worrying” basket.

2. People with mental health issues are so othered to them that their solution to people with mental health issues is “a cop with a gun”.

As for cop’s mental health, that’s a bit easier:

• I can’t speak for other countries, but where I’m from if a cop gets diagnosed with pretty much any acronym they risk getting their gun taken off them which directly restricts the jobs they can take and their career advancement. Where I’m from won’t even take on a recruit if they’ve been diagnosed with something. This means cops are terrified of taking any work provided therapy.

• pretty much all police orgs have a really bad machismo problem, which is one thing that keeps men from seeking mental healthcare in general.

• police tend not to require much formal education to start training and tend to pay better than other jobs with the same starting requirement (moral hazard pay), this can lead to the ‘golden handcuffs’ situation of not wanting to jeopardize this career because you’ll have to start at the bottom for a career which pays worse.

• it’s very common for society to see police as ‘essential workers’, which puts it under the umbrella of “we can make your work conditions terrible”; things like shift-work with really unpredictable hours tends to isolate people from their friends and family, making mental health worse and makes them more reliant on their job for their support network.

Reforming the police a tolerable institution seems impossible to me, but a decent start would be disarming them and making sure they are not the people who respond to mental health calls. Problem is that this requires a large part of the population to accept that you can’t simply shoot your problems, even if you hire a goon in blue to do it.

Regarding the US and their gun ownership: yeah, disarming cops is a lot more complicated and probably involves training them about de-escalation and the peelians. It also requires setting up some aptitude requirements, since basics like “time, distance & cover” are regularly forgone in favour of “warrior cop”, and currently there is a very strong pipeline from “that kid who tortures animals” to “corporal”.

The past is definitely not a guide for how to achieve a future society or how that society should look, but it does remind us that a society without a state can exist.

It’s not the hard part, but when we’re told that thoughts of a stateless society are fantastical it’s good to remember that it has been done before.

1. Software has bugs.
2. Bugs which interface with and execute untrusted code are high risk.
3. Browsers are obscenely large pieces of software, which connect a user’s system with random websites which execute JavaScript.

Browsers are one of the most important things to update on your computer.

We can talk about whether browsers should be as complicated as they are, but implying security updates are a intended as a vector of control is conspiricist thinking.

The reason you don’t get security updates backported to your older release of choice is simple: it is so much work.

Waterfox seems like a good choice, just don’t go around thinking that companies are making security updates in order to sneak in unwanted, they make security updates because they are terrified of being responsible for a major incident.

If any were it’s not like we would know, secrecy being rather important to that kind of activity.

I just want a diversity of architecture styles to be common, I love areas that are an eclectic mix of styles; it makes me feel like so many different people care about the area.

C because it’s what is used for low-end linux & embedded work.

Shell scripts because they’re the caulk that holds a Linux distro together.

Rust when possible because it’s how I wish systems programming could be.

I was a “ironically” racist as a young teen, it took me till my early adulthood to realise that being ironically racist is just being racist, and the edgy “humour” that is made at others expense isn’t funny or clever, and is incompatible with the kind, empathetic person I wanted to be.

Cringing at my teen self pushes me further into deprogramming myself from that shit, but I’m encouraged by the adage “if you don’t look at yourself from a decade ago and cringe, you wasted that decade”.

• Lisp is responsible for most of the parts of programming widely considered enjoyable.

• Fortran is still often used in some of our most performant libraries.

• POSIX shell was one of the most important parts of unix-like systems becoming how they are today, and it’s compatibility is still an invaluable glue for tying programs written in the 90’s to programs written today.

It feels like no matter where I move to, a communist seems to move in at the exact same time… It’s uncanny.

The specifics matter, but generally no.

When an actual fraud investigation is being done into something major like a casino laundering money, my government tends not to turn it into a media circus until after investigations are underway.

When a politician tells me they want to ‘tackle fraud’, especially welfare fraud, I hear “I want to arrest people for being poor”. It sounds like a dog-whistle to me, because every time I hear it used, it’s by people bearing a “the cruelty is the point” mindset.

Cost to manufacture is not more than wages, but cost to purchase a good is always more than the total cost of labour needed to produce it, so long as profit exists.

The money isn’t free so much as redistributed from taxation elsewhere, think of it as the same as subsidising industry except only to the workers of that industry (instead giving it to owners and expecting the savings to trickle downwards). You could also consider it an income tax rebate with more fine-grained control of who gets it.

It doesn’t seem particularly ground-breaking of a concept; I see the value in investing money into necessary but unprofitable industry though my concern is that if you subsidise wages of a business with a profit incentive, management may lower wages to compensate.

I disagree about rejecting funding from intelligence agencies. I hate the concept of their existence, as well as what orgs like the CIA have done (and proceed to do) but given the fact of their existence, they do have legitimate reasons (in this case I mean reasons that align with Signal’s current goals rather than in order to change them) to fund Signal, and if that results in funding secure software, all the better.

In addition to the downsides mentioned here about privacy regarding Google, there is a major upside to using this service: it offloads all of the authentication logic to google, so in theory it reduces your risk surface area, or it may be more accurate to say it concentrates your risk to your Google account.

You’d like to hope most websites use using common security best practices and keep on top of things but the amount of websites I had accounts on (on websites I had long forgotten) which have been pwned over the years tells me otherwise. Using google auth sets your account security to be exactly as secure as your Google account.

My parents treated my device access something they had to keep a keen eye on. They were good at manually making sure I wasn’t sitting around having my brain rot, but their spying on what I was doing into my teens left me with some trust issues.

They briefly tried to use technological solutions to control my access and monitor me, but all that served was to make me very good at circumventing them. Outsourcing parenting to a computer program doesn’t work, and kids notice when you try.

If it’s a G502/702, they’ve got a very fucky scroll wheel & middle click; it’s actually a lemon, but since nothing else works with the wireless pads they’re the only options.