bitofhope

I paid for the whole motherboard, I'm using the whole motherboard thank you very much. ASCII was good enough for the Bible, so it's good enough for me. God included character number 7 for a reason, even if that reason was for me to hear obnoxious buzzing from my audiophile grade piezo beeper.

My favorite bit:

When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can’t help

What base OS? The base metapackage that pulls in a small core of system software packages that are then treated and updated like any other package? What the hell is an EOL? You mean the thing that happens to non-rolling release distros such as Not Fucking Arch?

When GNU Scrotum 5.x series becomes unsupported after release 5.56, people running Arch Linux will be happy to know they already have gnu-scrotum-7.62.69-rc1 installed from their repositories. It's the people on LTS Enterprise distros who have to start whining at their maintainers to backport a major version of GNU Scrotum released since the Obama administration.

Humans have bouba intelligence, computers have kiki intelligence. This is makes so much more sense than considering how a chatbot actually works.

Ah, I recalled it having recovered quite a bit some years ago, but apparently that was temporary and due to a weather event. Even so, the direly depleted form of Ozone layer present in the Antarctic is still better than anything Mars could support.

Not that solar UV is going to be your biggest problem when the atmosphere is so thin you might as well try to breathe in a vacuum and >90% of the little that is there is CO~2~. If you can figure out how to breathe, you can probably come up with sunblock, too.

They're really fond of copypasta:

The issue with Arch isn't the installation, but rather system maintenance. Users are expected to handle system upgrades, manage the underlying software stack, configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it, set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.
The Arch installation process does not automatically set up security features, and tools like Pacman lack the comprehensive system maintenance capabilities found in package managers like DNF or APT, which means you'll still need to intervene manually. Updates go beyond just stability and package version upgrades. When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can't help—you'll need to intervene manually. In contrast, DNF and APT can automatically update or replace underlying software components as needed. For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability. In contrast, pacman requires users to manually implement such changes. This means you need to stay updated with the latest software developments and adjust your system as needed.

Can you blame someone for hoping that maybe Musk might plan to yeet himself to Mars. I'd be in favor, though I'd settle for cheaper ways to achieve similar results.

Yeah, Antarctica is a cakewalk compared to Mars. The temperature is maybe in a comparable ballpark if you squint. Everything else is way easier. You can breathe the air as is instead of living in a pressure vessel with an artificial atmosphere 24/7. You have water everywhere you can simply melt or desalinate and you don't have to even go to the even colder polar ice cap region for it because you're already there. You have a magnetic field allowing for an ozone layer which is nice because the sun is a deadly lazer. There are organisms around you can eat for nutrition, and whatever resources you lack can be brought over with a boat or aeroplane instead of a spaceship. You can get to Antarctica from any human settlement (with the possible exception of space stations) or vice versa in a matter of hours. You can have near-instantaneous communication with other humans on earth at any time, whereas one-way trip between Earth and Mars will take a radio wave anywhere between 3 and 14 minutes, assuming there's not some opaque body (such as a moon or a star) in the way. I'm probably missing a lot of other stuff but that's the ones off the top of my head.

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

Good advice even without the added weight of the technofascist coup context.

A lot of the ideas here are actually reflected in the EU GDPR, which requires anyone keeping any kind registry of natural persons to minimize the amount of personal data to be collected, processed and retained to only that which is consensual, necessary (contractually, legally, for protecting the life of the subject, or to carry out the duties of a public authority) or required for a purpose that's beneficial to either party and doesn't infringe on the rights of the subject.

Additionally, under GDPR personal data may not be processed for purposes that don't meet the above criteria even if the data is also used for another purpose that does. The data controller must also keep track of any third parties that might process the data and ensure they meet the same requirements for processing the data.

It also places additional requirements for processing "personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, […] genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation".

Complying with the GDPR (properly, not in the "have a shitty cookie popup on the website" way) in itself means giving consideration to most of what the article is telling the reader to do. Fascist administration or no, all of this should be seen as a common sense best practice. Personal data should be treated as a liability rather than an asset to ve hoarded. Apply a healthy dose of YAGNI.

As for those whose business model is surveillance capitalism, you should fuck off. Nobody should be allowed to profit from cyberstalking people en masse. I hope one day we will look back on today's tech industry the way we remember the robber barons of the gilded age.

I showed a one-year-old how to stack blocks into a tower and then how to knock it over. I then stacked them again and said "No! No breaking! No breaking! No breaking! Noooo!" as they knocked the tower over and giggled happily. Down the line this led to the Helvetica scenario somehow.

Lisp curmudgeons getting incorrected about AI history:

Overly power hungry statistics