First there was no difference between gaza/the Palestinians and Hamas, now there’s no difference between Hezbollah and Lebanon…

“I need some more [input] sanitizer for my eczema script, the console is red and inflamed whenever I check it.”

the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.

Even though I fully expect the police here aren’t doing as much as they could (I mean come on, are they expecting phones to come with wiimote hand straps?) , I’m at least glad their public rhetoric is that they can’t “arrest their way out of the problem”.

I imagine that’s poor compensation when you’ve just had your phone snatched, however.

The second season of Iron Blooded Orphans is a good follow-up to the first, and certainly contains the themes you’re looking for.

Part real Greens, part Greenpeace, part Green-washing.

The background trend, unfortunately, is of the far right slowly but surely gaining votes. We pushed them back to third place today, but they still almost doubled the number of representatives they’ll be sending to parliament (from 89 to the projected ~130 for today’s elections).

• In 2002, Jacques Chirac won against the far right with 82% (to the far right’s 18%).
• In 2017, Macron won against the far right with 66% (to the far right’s 34%).
• In 2022, Macron won against the far right with 58% (to the far right’s 41%).

IMO it’s largely a consequence of the center-left and center-right (Hollande, Macron) completely abandoning the working class, and demonizing the left whilst cozying up to the far-right (mostly Macron, though Hollande definitely slid right over his term).

The French political system, casually referred to as the “Republic of Friends,”

Where does the author get this? I’m French and have never heard of our system called as such - especially not by a French person.

He called during his televised speech to get rid of the “ruckus causers”, separately from the far right.

The current largest leftist party had (until last night) close to a third of Parliament, and have a reputation of loudly contesting shit they don’t stand for.

I really don’t think Macron’s intention is to give them a chance at more votes. If anything, he’s hoping this forces leftist voters to move towards the center, seeing as how his own party barely cleared 14% (the largest far right party did over 30, and a smaller splinter party got around 7% on its own).

My cynical take: he wants to let the far right win the legislative elections while he still has close to 3 years left in his term.

He thinks this will “show” their electorate that voting far right doesn’t get you what you want.

At the same time, he can take advantage of the media bashing the leftist party has been getting for their vocal opposition to Israel’s actions since October 7 2023, and run them out of Parliament. At least, it’s a gamble he’s willing to make.

He is just as much of a clueless, egotistical liberal as David Cameron was, so your analogy is sadly pretty accurate.

You may also interact with countless bots without ever knowing, because creating fake identities is free.

Maybe. Bots don’t seem currently capable of holding a conversation beyond surface level remarks. I think I tend to engage with thought-provoking stuff.

On the off chance that I reply to a bot, it is as much for my reply to be read by other humans viewing the conversation. So I don’t understand how interacting with countless bots is supposed to be such a big downside.

Plus, I don’t see how public/private key pairs prevents endless “fake” identity creation/proliferation. It’s not like you need a government-issued ID to generate them (which, to be clear, still wouldn’t be great -just got other reasons).

Fair, some people value their identity.

To be clear, I’m talking about online identities. In which case, I would argue that if you value it so much you should not delegate it to some third party network. My IRL identity is incredibly valuable to me, which is why I don’t tie it up with any online communications services, especially ones I have no control over.

For average people nothing changes, the app can hold their key for them and even offer email recovery.

…so then the app can post on my behalf without me knowing? And it’ll be signed as if I had done it myself. I don’t understand preferring this if you’re not also self hosting.

That’s something having signatures and a web of trust solves.

But as I wrote in my previous message regarding gpg signing circles (a web of trust), that doesn’t “solve” things. It just introduces more layers and steps to try and compensate for an inherently impossible ideal. Unless I’m misunderstanding your point here?

Besides, you fail to see another problem: Whichever centralized, federated site you use can manipulate anything you read and publish.

I just take that for granted on the internet. It’s true that key-signing messages should make that effectively impossible for all but the largest third parties (FAANG & nation-states). But you still need to verify keys/identities through some out-of-band mechanism, otherwise aren’t you blindly trusting the decentralized network to be providing you with the “true” keys and post, as made by the human author?

Anyway, if you don’t see a need for tools like nostr you don’t need them.

Maybe I’m not expressing myself properly; I don’t see how nostr (and tools like it) effectively address that/those needs.

Sort of like how there was (arguably still is) a need for cash that governments can’t just annul or reverse transactions of, yet bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies I’m aware of fail on that front by effectively allowing state actors (who have state resources) to participate in the mining network and execute 51% attacks.

It weirds me out that most of the arguments for nostr I come across are around how “you can’t loose your identity, it’s just a private/public keypair!”. Maybe I just don’t get banned enough to understand the perspective, but to me the real problem is the content/discussions being lost, not usernames for some corner of the web.

I really don’t care about loosing my identity on a social media website; I’ve found it healthier to view social media accounts on the same level as my customer account at my isp and power utility. When I change ISPs, the old account is closed down and I start up a new one at the other ISP. What’s important to me is the service getting delivered, not that it remembers that I’m the same person from however many years ago. It’s still the same me here in my body, interacting with the web. I know what I need from it, it doesn’t always need to remember who I am (and sometimes I’d rather it forgot or never knew in the first place).

My final point is a bit of a troll, but also kinda serious: how decentralized is it when your identity is “centralized” in your key pair? Loose your keys or loose your password to the key, and your identity is similarly effectively gone. Even worse in this case, no-one can restore it for you. Which is why I don’t tie my identity that much to any online service, especially ones I don’t host. The only thing that truly preserves my identity is the flesh-and-blood body that I inhabit (and even that isn’t fail-proof).

I’ve interacted with GPG signing circles before. So many people are losing access to their keys. So many more are considering some of their keys as compromised. In either case they’re regularly generating wholly new keys, essentially rebooting their “identity” from scratch. When they do so, they always rely on flesh-and-blood interactions to have their new identity verified and trusted by others.

Maybe it’s a question of which circles we’re involved in; mine are already regularly hopping accounts, without being forced to by bans or server outages. I’m used to interpreting the tone & content to recognize “people”, and ignoring usernames. On top of that so many people regularly change their display names on social media for vanity and expression purposes that I can’t reliably use them anyways for recognizing accounts.

I really appreciate Linus trying to tone down the nastiness in his replies over the years, but I’d be willing to let almost anything slide if it means getting a proper, old-school Torvalds tear-down of Musk.

Maybe nowadays, with Elon’s imbecility so publicly visible.

I’ve run Arch for close to 10 years, and was pretty jazzed by Musk in the early days of his presiding over Tesla and Space X. Then again, I was barely an adult at the time, and I hadn’t yet come across the first reports of terrible working conditions and his overall shittyness as a manager/exec.

Right?

“Protecting vulnerable individuals” - they must mean Putin and Bibbi, not actual victims of political intimidation, sabotage, etc.

Late to this thread, but this is disturbingly similar to the media-bashing a French-Palestinian politician has received recently.

She tweeted something along the lines of “time for an uprising” before attending a conference. The following week+ of interviews with her party colleagues were filled with “did you know uprising in Arabic is intifada?! Why is your colleague calling for violence?!?!?!”

Her name is Rima Hassan if you’re interested.

In light of the recent forays by AI projects/products into the reason of coding assistants, from copilot to Devin, this reads to me as a sign that they’ve finally accepted that you can’t make an ai assistant that provides actual value from an LLM purely trained on text.

This is Microsoft copying Google’s captcha homework. We trained their OCR for gBooks, we trained their image recognition on traffic lights and buses and so signs.

Now we get to train their ai assistant on how to click around a windows OS.

For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.

I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.

Kinda disappointing.

The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!

FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.

Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?

I think the point is to scold Google for the harm they cause or fail to prevent. When the law is written so as to genuinely prevent harm (data protection, for ex) then I will scold those who don’t follow it. When the law is written so as to be ineffective at best and harmful at worst, I will scold those who do follow it.

The point isn’t to be consistent with regards to the law, as the law itself is not always either consistent nor “good”.

… unless it is me that isn’t understanding your own comment?

There was a good (albeit short) conference at FOSDEM2020 that gave an overview of a bunch of different “prior work” with regards to government using open source: https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/municipal_government/

With regards to other comments about Munich, the speaker touches on that case starting at 7 minutes into the conf, and highlights how it differs/differed from other, more successful, cases.