Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

Tankies make liberals uncomfortable because liberals believe they are the furthest left you can go

Without trying to be combative, but that sounds like one of those tidbits which one side believes about the other, circulated only to divide. At least I don’t have the impression that it is a view with any footing amongst liberal-minded people.

Most liberals want to move further left, ideas like free college and public education, public transport, less corporate power and splitting up large corporations, even unconditional basic income, etc. are popular with the majority. Just violent revolution and authoritarianism won’t roll, after all, liberal means “live and let live.”

As a mixed-ideology lefty (maybe I fit within your definition of liberal), I’m not worried about tankies being too far left, not at all, rather, I am tempted to think of them as confused right wingers believing themselves to be “the left.”

Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.

Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

I assume this is about the physical connections.

It could be for monitoring (even with unbroken encryption, the routing information and time/server correlation can shed light on social media influence campaigns or where VPN beachheads are located). This information could probably be gathered with ISP cooperation, too, but private business and Russian money can be a problematic mix.

It could also be preparations to isolate Russia from the internet when/if their war expands into Europe. Russia has done the reverse already in 2019, BBC: Russia ‘successfully tests’ its unplugged internet, probably either to stop Russian people from getting news outside of government-controlled media if the tide turns against Putin or to fend off the possibility of Western countries turning the tables and running disinformation campaigns inside Russia.

Incomplete map of internet crossover points to Russia (sorry, couldn’t find a better one, it had low resolution and I upscaled it):

Theistic Satanists

These would be the (mostly imaginary) ones that conservative Christians are fearmongering about. They’d believe the actual devil exists and that by serving him, they could gain something.

Atheistic Satanists

The kind that is pulling this stunt to fight for religious freedom. Specifically, The Satanic Temple. Their “commandments” are secular compassion, empathy and justice.

Amusingly, the biblical Satan seemed to value many of those things. Freedom (“non serviam” / “I will not serve”), Reason (apple from tree of knowledge in paradise), and perhaps Self Reliance and Equality (in some variants of the creation myth, Adam has a divorced first wive named Lilith who gave him the middle finger when he pulled that alpha male malarkey)

Do you know what we get to see of this “actual left” around here?

Not organizers trying to set up a demonstration in Washington. Not people linking to websites explaining how to mail your governor or the white house with suggested text passages. Not activists recruiting stunt performers to make some artistic display that will get reported in the press. Not people trying to aid the resistance within Israel itself.

All we see is people trying to dissuade the non-fascists from voting.

Fascist Russia’s genocidal war on Ukraine is completely masked out. In online spaces held by Marxist-Leninists, aka tankies, fascist Russia is even elevated to be the good guy, with mods deleting dissent. During China’s genocide of the Uyghurs, tankies posted Chinese propaganda memes trying to keep their communities supportive of China.

German anti-fascists had a name for such people. Collaborators.

These “don’t vote” posts always do the same shtick, too, attacking and blaming liberals (hint: Marx actually admired liberalism), while claiming some true, real, actual left is much better (how? are they all John Rambo? Do we have to wait until the shooting starts?). It just doesn’t look very organic, it looks like talking points constantly injected into tankie spaces by Russian propagandists.

I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”

I think you’re mistaken there.

Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):

Also, some advice from WineHQ:

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

I read his manifesto and substack. He had his own brand of crazy, mixing Russian misinformation and personal delusions half-and-half.

His gist is “climate change and resource scarcity will destroy society, the elites know it and created cryptocurrency to collapse global finance, which will fix things while making them untouchable rulers.”

That would (just like Git LFS) store full, separate copies of every single version of the large files I manage. I really, really don’t want to go there, nor do I have even a fraction of the hard drive space for that…

That’s what I meant when I wrote “Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository” - they can’t point to a path inside a repository, only to another repository root. That unfortunately renders them useless for me (I’d have to set up in the order of hundreds of small repositories for the sets of shared data I have).

I’m already using Git for source code related versioning, but some use cases involving large binary files with partial updates aren’t well covered by Git (I’ve gone into some detail in my reply to @[email protected]).

There’s also the lack of svn:externals in Git. Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository as far as I’m aware.

I’m already using Git, thus my experience with Gitea. I am well versed with svndumpfilter and git-svn to extract and migrate individual Subversion repositories to Git.

I’m not only hosting code, but I have several projects involving large binary files with binary changes. Git’s delta compression algorithm for binary files is so-so. Git LFS is just outsourcing the problem. Even cloning with --depth 1 --single-branch gives me abysmal performance compared to Subversion.

So I’m still looking for a nice WebUI to make my life with the Subversion repositories I have easier.

After finding out that tools that are to “bureaucratic” don’t stick with me (bureaucratic as in, I need to fill out forms to create projects/tasks, update them and follow defined workflows), I ended up with Trilium.

It at first looks like a very free-form note taking app (a tree of documents on the left, click and edit away), but it has a lot of extra functionality that lets you construct journals and tasks lists in the document tree (like its Task Manager which is already set up in the Demo notes of a new Trilium install).

Anyone remember the Foxconn building deal during the Trump presidency? It was supposed to prop Republicans up in the mid-terms of 2018.

The GOP offered a $2.85 billion subsidy so Foxconn would build an LCD panel manufacturing plant in Wisconsin. Apparently the subsidy was in the form of tax credits. Trump calls Foxconn “8th wonder of the world” despite its cost.

According to The Verge:

The renovations never arrived. Neither did the factory, the tech campus, nor the thousands of jobs. Interviews with 19 employees and dozens of others involved with the project, as well as thousands of pages of public documents, reveal a project that has defaulted on almost every promise. The building Foxconn calls an LCD factory — about 1/20th the size of the original plan — is little more than an empty shell. In September, Foxconn received a permit to change its intended use from manufacturing to storage.

As far as I can tell (from skimming over a few recent news articles), they ultimately employed about 1000 people (7%-10% of what was promised). When negative reporting on the project ramped up, Republicans claimed that incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers tried to renegotiate the deal and blamed him. When that turned out to be a lie, Republicans pivoted to the more nebulous claim that Foxconn bailed because Wisconsin was unfriendly to business under its fresh Democratic governor.

This could be a great side-by-side comparison on how Dems vs. Reps handle such a project, but I doubt the average person caught in the news cycle still remembers Foxconn after nearly 6 years). 😅

When you have a bunch of computers networked, each of them is assigned a unique number, so when other computers send data on the wire, they can say who it is meant for (imagine each blurb of data starting out like: “yo, I’m sending these next 500 bytes for computer 0A123FBC32, here they come”).

Now the right computer will listen, but it doesn’t know what program the data is for - is it a chunk of a file your browser is downloading? Or the email your email app wants to display? Or perhaps a join request from your buddy’s computer for the Minecraft game you’re hosting?

So in addition to the unique number of the target computer, the data also specifies a “port number”, which tells the computer which of its running programs the data is meant for (programs ask the computer’s operating system: “if any network data arrives on port XY, give it to me”). Some ports have become standards - for example, a program that serves web pages to other computers would typically ask the operating system that any data arriving on the computer that indicates port numbers 80 and 443 should be given to it, and when a web browser wants to fetch a web page, it will send a request to the computer serving the page, defaulting to port 80 o 443.

If you dig deeper, you’ll find that there are even more unique numbers involved and routers/firewalls let data through not only by port number but also by distinguishing between data that is the initial request to another computer’s port number and data that is an answer to an earlier seen request – and more.

I love that example. Microsoft’s Copilot (based on GTP-4) immediately doesn’t disappoint:

It’s annoying that for many things, like basic programming tasks, it manages to generate reasonable output that is good enough to goat people into trusting it, yet hallucinates very obviously wrong stuff or follows completely insane approaches on anything off the beaten path. Every other day, I have to spend an hour to justify to a coworker why I wrote code this way when the AI has given him another “great” suggestion, like opening a hidden window with an UI control to query a database instead of going through our ORM.

I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.