Metal. 🤘

You’re correct.

Check out “The Separation of Church and Hate” by John Fugelsang. It’s an almost comprehensive teardown of Christofascist ideology using the words of Jesus directly. No extras and no oulled punches. It’s excellent. The author is a comedian and while the content is serious and presented well it’s dressed up as an easier read than I expected.

I grew up Christian in the American South. I left religion in college and faith generally a few years later. I was initially compelled to leave organized Christianity exactly because it demanded exercising cruelties which Jesus clearly opposed.

Fugelsang’s book gathers all of the major contradictions between Jesus and modern right-wing Christianity then dismantles any justification for each one just by quoting Jesus. I’m recommending this book to every reasonable person I know as required reading for the present moment. Not just in the US but the world over.

Fascism respects nothing and if it takes root in a land with the means to export then no shore is necessarily safe harbor.

An surprise, I’m sure, but a welcome one.

Eyes don’t normally do that. I think you should squirt see a doctor.

Yes but, also, no.

You already seem familiar but, for the uninitiated playing along at home, Wikipedia’s entry for Simulation Theory is a pretty easy read. Quoting their synopsis of Bostrom’s conjecture:

1. either such simulations are not created because of technological limitations or self-destruction;
2. advanced civilizations choose not to create them;
3. if advanced civilizations do create them, the number of simulations would far exceed base reality and we would therefore almost certainly be living in one.

it’s certainly an interesting thought. I agree it shouldn’t inform our ethics or disposition toward our lived experiences. That doesn’t mean there’s zero value in trying to find out though. Even if the only positive yield is that we develop better testing methods which still come up empty: that’s still progress worth having. If it nets some additional benefit then so much the better.

I’d argue that satisfying curiosity is, in itself, and worthy pursuit so long as no harm is done.

That all still sets aside the more interesting question though. If such simulations are possible then are they something we’re comfortable creating? If not, and we find one has been built, what should we do? Turn it off? Leave it alone? “Save” those created inside of it?

These aren’t vapid questions. They strike at the heart of many important unresolved quandries. Are the simulated minds somehow less real than unsimulated ones? Does that question’s answer necessarily impact those mind’s right to agency, dignity, or self-determination?

The closer we get to being able to play god on a whim the more pressing I find such questions. That’s not because I wring my hands and labor anxiously at truth or certainty for lack of better idols. It’s because, whatever this is, we’re all in it together and our choices today have an outsized impact on the choices others will have tomorrow. Developing a clearer view of what this is, and what we’re capable of doing in it, affords future minds better opportunity to arrive at reasonable conclusions and decide how to live well.

For the curious:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/746684/why-does-a-microwaves-faraday-cage-block-microwaves-but-not-larger-wavelength-r

The metal screen on the microwave door is designed to block the specific wavelength being used to heat your food. It isn’t a full cage and isn’t effective at blocking other frequencies.

Absolutely. VMs and Containers are the wise sysadmin’s friends. Instead of rolling my own ip blocker I use Fail2Ban on public-facing machines. It’s invaluable.

That sounds pretty good to me for self-hosted services you’re running just for you and yours. The only addition I have on the DR front is implementing an off-site backup as well. I prefer restic for file-level backups, Proxmox Backup Server for image backups (clonezilla works in a pinch), and Backblaze B2 for off-site storage. They’re reliable and reasonably priced. If a third party service isn’t in the cards then get a second SSD and put it in a safety deposit box or bury it on the other side of town or something. Swap the two backup disks once a month.

The point is to make sure you’re following the 3-2-1 principal. Three copies of your data. Two different storage mediums. One remote location (at least). If disaster strikes and your home disappears you want something to restore from rather than losing absolutely everything.

Extending your current set up to ship the external SSD’s contents out to B2 would likely just be pointing rsync at your B2 bucket and scheduling a cron or systemd timer to run it.

After that if you’re itching for more I’d suggest reading/watching some Red Team content like the stuff at hacker101 dot com and sans dot org. OWASP dot org is also building some neat educational tools. Getting a better understanding of the what and why around internet background noise and threat actor patterns is powerful.

You could also play around with Wazuh if you want to launch straight into the Blue Team weeds. Education of the attacking side is essential for us to be effective as defenders but deeper learning anywhere across the spectrum is always a good thing. Standing up a full blown SIEM XDR, for free, offers a lot of education.

P. S. I realize this is all tangential to your OP. I don’t care for the grizzled killjoys who chime in with “that’s dumb don’t do that” or similar, offer little helpful insight, and trot off arrogantly over the horizon on their high horse. I wanted to be sure I offered actionable suggestions for improvement and was tangibly helpful.

You can meaningfully portscan the entire internet in a trivial amount of time. Security by obscurity doesn’t work. You just get blindsided. Switching to a non-standard port cleans the logs up because most of the background noise targets standard ports.

It sounds like you’re doing alright so far. Trying not to get got is only part of the puzzle though. You also ought to have a backup and recovery strategy (one tactic is not a strategy). Figuring out how to turn worst-case scenarios into solvable annoyances instead of apocalypse is another (and almost equally as important). If you’re trying to increase your resiliency, and if your Disaster Recovery isn’t fully baked yet, then I’d toss effort that way.

It’s a practice at least as old as type itself. It seems the attention Trump garnered, and the highlighting of his stereotypical Boomer typing, have merged the two in some people’s minds.

We’re at a unique crossroad where Gen X and Y grew up with their grandparents mostly refusing to use cell phones and their parents mostly fumbling with them. Now Gen Z and “Alpha” are growing up with grandparents who have mostly been shamed into acceptable text etiquette, and parents who are mostly as tech savvy as the next parent and who were there when the deep magic was written (so to speak).

Mango Mussolini’s narcissism is as pervasive as his parasitism so it’s no wonder the lecherous rapist’s sins against modern digital convention survived along with him. Some spin that as brilliant tactics but I’m not so sure. I’d wager it’s a coincidence he leaned into because it garnered attention.

Most of those now driving online discourse hadn’t had the same exposure to that style of texting prior to the 2016 US Presidential election cycle as preceding generations. So it seems novel to them. It’s history and perspective bring formed in real time.

It isn’t just one thing. The big money wants to present this unified front to the public like LLMs are a single commodity anyone can use. In reality they’re a collection of complex tools that few can use " correctly" and whose utility is highly specialized for niches those few find valuable.

So you’re correct in a way. I’m sure model decoherence isn’t helping much either and isn’t as visible in those niche applications as it is for the general public.

Near as I understand it: years ago some dumb engineering decisions were made, acknowledged, and corrected. Is there some recent scandal I’m out of the loop on?

Sure! That’s an SMTP Relay. A lot of folks jumped on the poopoo wagon. It’s common wisdom in IT that you don’t do your own email. There are good reasons for that, and you should know why that sentiment exists, however; if you’re interested in running your own email: try it! Just don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Keep your third party service until you’re quite sure you want to move it all in-house (after due diligence is satisfied and you’ve successfully completed at least a few months of testing and smtp reputation warming).

Email isn’t complex. It’s tough to get right at scale, a pain in the ass if it breaks, and not running afoul of spam filtering can be a challenge. It rarely makes sense for even a small business to roll their own email solution. For an individual approaching this investigatively it can make sense so long as you’re (a.) interested in learning about it, (b.) find the benefits outweigh the risks, and (c.) that the result is worth the ongoing investment (time and labor to set up, secure, update, maintain, etc).

What’ll get you in trouble regardless is being dependent on that in-house email but not making your solution robust enough to always fill its role. Say you host at home and your house burns down. How inconvenient is it that your self-hosted services burned with it? Can you recover quickly enough, while dealing with tragedy, that the loss of common utility doesn’t make navigating your new reality much more difficult?

That’s why it rarely makes sense for businesses. Email has become an essential gateway to other tooling and processes. It facilitates an incredible amount of our professional interactions. How many of your bills and bank statements and other important communication are delivered primarily by email? An unreliable email service is intolerable.

If you’re going to do it make sure you’re doing it right, respecting your future self’s reliance on what present-you builds, and taking it slow while you learn (and document!) how all the pieces fit together. If you can check all of those boxes with a smile then good luck and godspeed says I.

The features would break if they were built in.

You can’t know that and I can’t imagine it would be true. If the plugins many folks find essential were incorporated into GNOME itself then they’d be updated where necessary as a matter of course in developing a new release.

GNOME has clear philosophy and they work for themselves, not for you so they decide what features they care to invest time and what features they don’t care about.

You’re not wrong! This is an arrogant and common take produced in poor taste though. A holdover from the elitism that continues to plague so many projects. Design philosophy leads UX decision making and the proper first goal for any good and functional design is user accessibility. This is not limited to accomodations we deem worthy of our attention.

Good artists set ego aside to better serve their art. Engineers must set pet peeves aside to better serve their projects. If what they find irksome gets in the way of their ability to build functionally better bridges, homes, and software then it isn’t reality which has failed to live up to the Engineer’s standards. This is where GNOME, and many other projects, fall short. Defenders standing stalwart on the technical correctness of a volunteer’s lack of obligation to those whose needs they ostensibly labor for does not induce rightness. It exposes the masturbatory nature of the facade.

Engineers have every right to bake in options catering to their pet peeves (even making them the defaults). That’s not the issue. When those opinions disallow addressing the accessibility needs of those who like and use what they’ve built there is no justification other than naked pride. This is foolish.

Having a standardised method for plugins is in my opinion good enough, nobody forces you to use extensions. And if you don’t want extensions to break, then wait till the extensions are ready prior updating GNOME.

I agree! Having a standardized method for plugins is good, however; the argument which follows misses the point. GNOME lucked into a good pole position as one of the default GNU/Linux DEs and has enjoyed the benefit of that exposure. Continuing to ignore obvious failures in method elsewhere while enshrining chosen paradigms of tool use as sacrosanct alienates users for whom those paradigms are neither resonant nor useful.

No one will force Engineers to use accessibility features they don’t need. Not needing them doesn’t justify refusing the build them. Not building them as able is an abdication of social responsibility. If an engineer does not believe they have any social responsibility then they shouldn’t participate in projects whose published design philosophy includes language such as:

People are at the heart of GNOME design. Wherever possible, we seek to be as inclusive as possible. This means accommodating different physical abilities, cultures, and device form factors. Our software requires little specialist knowledge and technical ability.

Their walk isn’t matching their talk in a few areas and it is right and good to call them to task for it.

Post statement: This is coming from someone who drives Linux daily, mostly from the console, and prefers GNOME to KDE. All of the above is meant without vitriol or ire and sent in the spirit of progress and solidarity.

Whichever species, if any, rise to sapience after the age of mammals comes to its close.

Would you elaborate on this concern? I’m not sure I understand but I’d like to.

laughs in home lab

Not that I’d buy it but, if I did, that power button might get used twice a year. Likely less since I wouldn’t be able to upgrade or maintenance its hardware.

That’s a problem. Absolutely. It’s not the problem though. I’m not sure the problem can be summarized so succinctly. This is the way I’ve been putting it:

These are the top reasons humanity needs successful, decentralized, open social media platforms:

1. Collecting and selling user’s private data is dangerous and unethical.
2. Using that data to intentionally and directly manipulate user’s thinking is even worse.
3. All of the major centralized social media companies have been proven to either allow these illicit information campaigns or coordinate them directly. TikTok is the focus right now but Sophie Zhang exposed Facebook for doing exactly what TikTok has been exposed for recently. Can you recall any meaningful consequences for Facebook? Do you think Facebook is now safe to use?
4. It’s clear that most political leaders are either too ignorant, too corrupt, or too inept to meaningfully legislate against these problems.
5. The concerned public can’t shut Pandora’s box. No one is coming to save us from big tech or the monied interests and nation-states that wield it.
6. The concerned public can’t easily and legally audit the platforms big tech builds because they are closed and proprietary.
7. Personal choice is not enough. Not using centralized social media increases personal safety but does little to curb its influence otherwise.

These are listed by order of intuitive acceptance rather than importance. I find it aids the conversation.

The best reasonable answer to these problems I’ve seen proposed is for the public to create an open and decentralized alternative that’s easier to use and provides a better user experience.

Will that kind of alternative be a force for pure good? I’m not sure. To your point: I’m not convinced social media of any kind can be more than self-medication to cope with modernity. Then again I’ve had incredible and meaningful conversations with close friends after passing the bong around and spent time on Facebook/Reddit, and now Mastodon/Lemmy/etc, doing the same. Those interactions were uplifting and humanizing in ways that unified and encouraged all involved.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. We need to take care of each other, refuse pure hedonism, and protect the vulnerable (and we’re all varying degrees of vulnerable). At the same time: humans aren’t happy in sterile viceless productivity prisons. Creating spaces for leisure which do no harm in the course of their use isn’t just a nice idea… It’s necessary for a functional and happy society.

I’m not sure I’m parsing your fifth paragraph correctly. Are you suggesting Proxmox is DIY and unsuitable for Production? That Proxmox is suitable for Production and those who think they can roll their own hypervisor are in for a bad time? Something else?

That’s a fair take. Silver Blue is great and, in the spirit of the thread, if I were helping an interested but hesitant lifelong Windows/Intel/Nvidia user migrate to Linux today I would:

1. Buy them a new SSD or m.2 (a decent 1tb is ~$50 & a good one only ~$100).
2. Have them write down what applications, tools, games, sites, etc they use most often.
3. Swap their current Windows OS drive with the new drive and, if needed, show them how and why that works or provide an illustrated how-to (so this choice is not a one-way street paved with anxiety. If they want to swap back, or transfer files, or whatever else; they can. Easily). Storage drives are just diaries for computers. The user should know there’s nothing scary or mystical about them.
4. Install Fedora Kinoite on that new drive.
5. Swap them from Fedora’s custom Flatpak repository to Flathub proper. A decision that should be given to the user on install IMO but I digress.
6. Install their catalogue of goodies from step 2 so they’re not starting from scratch.
7. Install pika and configure a sane home directory backup cadence.
8. Ask them to kick the tires and test drive that Linux install for at least a month.

Kinoite is going to feel the most like Windows and, once configured, stay out of the way while being a safe, familiar, transparent gateway to the things the user wants to use.

My personal OS choices are driven by ideals, familiarity, design preferences, and a bank of good will / public trust.

I disagree with some of Red Hat’s business model. I fully support the approach SUSE takes. I’m also used to the OpenSUSE ecosystem, agree with most of their project’s design philosophies, and trust their intentions. I’m not a “fan” though and will happily recommend and install Silver Blue or any other FOSS system on someone’s computer if that’s what they want and it makes sense for them! Opinionated discussion can be productive and healthy. Zealotry facilitates neither.

That said: Aeon has been out of beta for a while. The latest release is Release Candidate 3 and they’re closing in on the first full release. Nvidia drivers work after a bit of fiddling. 🙂

I’m going to edit my previous post to add the Kinoite suggestion for posterity’s sake.