The American way

nonlethal methods

Okay, now imagine the city spending a billion dollars a year on preventing shark attacks, and elections being decided based on the candidates shark policy.

Its kinda funny to me, its like you can talk about how shitting is necessary for humans to live but don’t you dare say you’re gonna go take a dump.

Turn her into a frog, 100%

The vast majority of the time they don’t give a shit when they ask this question, they’re just testing your willingness to kowtow. But this is especially true when its a fucking burger king.

deleted by creator

The sacred texts

Yeah, it doesn’t actually make much of a difference:

Fundamentally the idea of having a separate admin account, which is completely protected, and a user account where everything can mingle together and see everything else, is a 1960s security model. It was originally created for a world where the owner of the computer and the user of the computer were two different people. In that world the user provides all the software that they want to run in their account (they probably wrote it) and the OS’s job is to protect the admin account from users and the users from each other.

Fast forward to the present day and this security model is completely mismatched with the reality of a personal computer. The internet exists, the user and owner are the same person, and they’re probably not writing all their software themselves. A piece of malicious or compromised software can encrypt every file in your user folder, steal your browser history, your saved passwords, and (on xwindows) record your keystrokes and make your screen display anything it wants, all without privilege escalation. But you can rest assured knowing that the user account can’t violate any timeshare limits that the root account placed on it.

The one thing you could argue is that a separate admin account makes it easier to detect and fix a compromised user account, but:

1. Most people are not in the habit of regularly logging into their root account and examining all the processes that are running in their user account. In fact many distributions do not even have a separate root account.

2. If you do think your computer has been compromised the sensible thing is to wipe the disk and restore from backup. It just doesn’t make any sense to fiddle around trying to figure out just how compromised you are and trying to reverse the process in a running system.

3. If you’re running xwindows I hope you never install updates or type your password for any other reason while some malicious software is running, since, as previously stated, anything running under your account can record your keystrokes. In that case your admin account is compromised anyway without having to use any privilege escalation exploits. Can you see how all this stuff was built with the assumption that the user and owner are two separate people with two separate passwords?

With Wayland and containerized applications we are slowly moving away from that 1960s security posture, which is something that’s long overdo. But currently something like Linux Mint is not really much better off than Haiku, from a pure security model standpoint.

In any case its security model is not the interesting thing about Haiku.

Yeah, a tortoise can’t come out of its shell any more than a human can come out of their rib cage.

Neither Haiku or 9front use systemd, and they’re both very interesting from a technical and design perspective (though not for their init systems).

If it has to be a Linux distribution I would say Damn Small Linux (DSL), because its really impressive just how few resources it requires. You can run x windows and even browse the web (using Dillo) on a system that’s small enough to fit in the L3 cache of some modern CPUs.

I don’t daily drive any of these though, so they might not count as my “favorite”.

1. Some sort of sex thing
2. This comes to mind, even though its specifically for dads:

Lol the little antenna

This is a little bit like having AIDS, getting a flare-up, and then saying “well I’m glad at least something is happeing”.

I understand the frustration at the general political ambivalence following “the end of history” in the 90s and the endless wars in the 2000s, but a flare-up isn’t going to make the aids go away. In the absolute best case impossible scenario where everything that’s been going on miraculously stops tomorrow we’re still locked into another 50+ years of consequences from this administration, just like we have problems decades afterwards that can be traced back to the Reagan administration.

In a worse case scenario, well, let’s just say that neither Germany nor Italy today are particularly better off or highly progressive compared to their neighbors. Like I said, having a flare-up does not cure your AIDS.

If someone has a counter example from history I would unironically genuinely love to hear it, because at this point I’ve given up hope of the world becoming a socially better place in my lifetime.

I am reminded of this blog post.

The fact that less infrastructure is needed per person (or per building) in many places compared to North America is probably a contributing factor as well, especially if we’re comparing NA to Japan.

Just as we shape our experiences so to do our experiences shape us; the swarf is a part of you now.

It kinda brothers me when I see something attributed to an entire country when it really only has to do with a small group or area within that county.

Like a single town in India could do some thing, with 95% of the population having no idea about it, and the headline would say “look at this thing India did!”. I use India as an example because I feel like this happens with non english speaking or non-western countries more. Like, if it were US researchers that made the silence gun the caption would say “researchers at Harvard” instead of “the US did this”.

I think its appropriate to use that phrasing when its something that was done as part of a national government project or policy, if its something that exists across a wide swath of the population/area of the country, or if you are comparing a thing across two countries (e.g. the Taiwanese semiconductor industry vs the South Korean one).

(I wanted to post pictures of cables too)

Can you recommend a recipe that uses mushrooms?

Having a legacy is overrated IMO. I would settle for just knowing I had a net positive effect on the world, but even that’s a pipe dream.

How hard is it to just say “I don’t like that scent”?