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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The law comes in two parts, the actual written bit that says what it is and the enforcement. Most people consider the first part what is necessary and lobby hard for it but really the most important bit in a practical sense is how it gets applied and enforced, without which the law is worthless. In many countries one way to defang laws is simply underfund the legal system or quangos that do the enforcement, another is putting someone in charge at the attornies office who de-prioritises those cases. The law as written isn’t worth the paper/bytes its written on unless there is a plan for enforcement that doesn’t involve every poor person using the rich mans legal system against giant corporations with infinite defence money.


  • There are capitalist elements. The Picard family still owns a farm and farm house and pass it down generations. There is still some concept of money being used by humans who are pursing payments for rare and stolen goods. Most of what we see around Starfleet is merit driven people working in starfleet out of self interest but the ships appear to be owned by Starfleet and they seem to have some democractic structure. Since most basic needs are met via replicators it seems they are post scarcity and trips to the doctors seem free but is not really socialism in the sense of people owning the means of production, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything said about how these ships get built and the implication is its a lot of automation but there seem to be a lot of facilities on Earth with people in them like Starfleet academy and in bars. We have no idea how factories work in this world other than on other planets and people work in them.

    I don’t think its brilliantly clear, there are a mix of ideologies on display and what makes it hang together is the humans are all behaving well, which isn’t very human nature like at all. People don’t seem to own what they are working with in all cases but they do in some of the smaller settlements so its a bit of a mix dependent on circumstances.



  • It really depends on the project. Some of them take breaking changes seriously and don’t do them and auto migrate and others will throw them out on “minor” number releases and there might be a lot of breaking changes but you only run into one that impacts you occasionally. I typically don’t want containers that are going to be a lot of work to keep up to date so I jettison projects that have unreliable releases for whatever reason and if they put out a breaking change its a good time to re evaluate whether I want that container at all and look at alternatives.

    So no its not safe, but depending on the project it actually can be.


  • When I look at how much Nigel Farage has been platformed in the UK the press helped manufacture the consent for Brexit and the big far right swing that is coming with it. What were quite isolated social media views have become very mainstream and on the TV all the time. Society is now quite open about a lot of far right talking points. Social media is a part of the media landscape but it didn’t make the far right figures popular that was all the traditional presses doing.

    Even now they cover and platform Nigel Farage about 100x as much as they do any Green candidate, and yet the Greens hold more MP and council seats. Same with the Lib Dems who are bigger than Reform and yet the press is constantly platforming Reform. Its hard to look at traditional media and see anything but a big swing to the right in the last decade and they have led every step of the way.




  • Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware’s true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

    The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn’t sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.


  • You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.

    While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can’t have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.


  • Pretty much all technology goes through the same odd shape of adoption.

    https://www.infusedinnovations.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2020-10-10-at-8.46.48-AM-1.png

    What is often really hard to tell is where you are until your definitely in the trough of Disillusionment. We could be practically very early on the way up and human level or above AI is coming or near the peak of Inflated expectations and its about to crash down before finally finding a use that is less hype and more worthwhile. The regulation will certainly slow things down a bit towards the peak.

    I am not sure whether slightly better chat bots that still lie and image generators that do look reasonably good is the peak or just the beginning. Progress has been dramatic in the past years since invention but the cost of training is now immense and it requires a breakthrough to make big steps of improvement and I am not sure if we are going to make that. A lot of billionaire money riding on it.