A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I’m not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it’s been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.

Basically, especially right now it’s clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it’s really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.

Can you give any specific examples

The police believe that the motive behind this hacking was to reduce network-related costs, as torrent transfers can be costly for internet service providers. KT, however, claims that it was merely trying to manage traffic on its network to ensure a smooth user experience.

Sounds like they admit it but object to the negative tone lol

So the metaphor here is lewd the AI, got it

I can agree it’s a little bit racist and wrong to tell the story using that sort of slur, and honestly I kind of think likely the entire story is very racist due to being fake and made up to get a laugh at the expense of Indian people, but if it’s real it seems worse to be knowingly bringing harassment down on your coworkers by intentionally antagonizing people for a laugh when you’re supposed to be doing your job, I think that probably does more actual harm.

killswitch doesn’t work because packets can still get through between the time when the VPN goes offline and when it activates, need to bind torrent client to vpn or have some firewall configuration to prevent non-vpn traffic

As long as they aren’t putting ridiculous terms on model usage like SD3 and the weights are provided I’m happy with it

This often happens to me on Windows with the Index so it might not even be a Linux specific issue

It’s good to be skeptical of institutions, just don’t go dismissing or accepting science based on ideological/class association, that’s how you get shit like Lysenkoism

The laws generally require adults to upload some form of government ID

Absolutely insane, KYC for looking at pornography

more limited risk

Doubt

I want to do stuff

Total water absorption doesn’t matter that much because the significant thing is surface texture. If you’re going to dry them anyway you might as well instead wash them without directly pouring water on them.

This assumes you’re going to fry them. If you want raw mushrooms in a salad, it’s going to be a lot more noticeable.

Running mushrooms under water makes them soggy, that’s just reality. You can get them just as clean wiping them with a slightly damp paper towel or cloth without that happening.

It seemed mostly straightforward to me but maybe I didn’t get it? It’s a bunch of stories through time following the decay and collapse of human civilization that mostly have a “slavery and dehumanization is bad but there’s hope because the human spirit” sort of theme, with the narratives connected mostly by the characters reading and being inspired by the records of the previous character’s story. They all end partway on a misleading cliffhanger, and then in the second part of the book it works through them backwards to give the endings. Also maybe they are reincarnations of each other but it’s ambiguous and doesn’t affect the plot afaik.

Microsoft hasn’t detailed ESU pricing for consumers yet, but the company did previously reveal it will offer these extended updates to consumers for the first time ever

They’re actually gonna make us pirate security updates huh

After all, they - the U.S. and its crappy allies - have declared a war on us without rules!

How about that “no nukes” rule tho

Really interesting article. The general idea seems to be that people having their access to banking shut down has been a real problem for a long time, and is most commonly imposed on marginalized groups, but people don’t realize it’s going on, and the people on the right making noise about this issue ignore where the bulk of the problem is.

This is sometimes how I feel when I appear on the ‘anti-mainstream’ ‘free thought’ media outlets. They want to hear about the financial censorship of the Freedom Convoy, but they don’t want to hear about restrictions on Aboriginal payments. This hints to a skew in their freedom of thought, and it’s certainly not open-minded. When they approach me, they’re trying to recruit that mercenary side of me who is nominally prepared to defend their narrow free thinking, but this poses an ethical dilemma, because their selective curation of what examples of payments censorship they’re prepared to ask about or listen to amounts to a silent form of censorship in itself. Selectively hearing, and amplifying, one set of injured voices - the Truckers - can be very similar to blocking another set out.

Firstly, yes, it’s very important to fight the general principle of payments censorship (and, by extension, to protect the cash system that provides a buffer agai nst it). Secondly, I must inform them that the actual chances of payments censorship being used against them is smaller than the chances of it being used against refugees, migrants, the homeless, or sex workers, who face recent real-world cases of financial censorship.

If there are two or more cell towers within range of the phone and they have access to those towers they can triangulate the location of the phone already.