It is not any one individual’s responsibility to fix any other particular individual, true.

Rather, it is the community’s responsibility to care for the community. All of the community.

If you start declaring some members of the community to be undeserving of care, then you are no better than the fascists.

Also came in to recommend URLCheck! Fantastic tool, everyone should use it.

People who are treated like outcasts behave like outcasts. The judgment becomes self-fulfilling.

The solution to this problem is inclusiveness and socialization, not further judgment and ostracization.

I can’t find a picture of that exact model, but to me it looks like it has the silver box HP logo like this one:

Compaq had this square Q logo, and usually the entire word “Compaq” also:

But there could be some confusion because HP acquired Compaq in 2002 and sold computers with Compaq branding until 2013, which covers the Vista period. It’s entirely possible they sold the same desktop shell with both HP and Compaq branding.

And no thats definitely a Zip drive, not a 3.5" floppy:

The little round button on the right and the round inset under the slot give it away.

Yes, surely TOR will protect us from government surveillance…

The project was originally developed on behalf of the U.S. intelligence community and continues to receive U.S. government funding, and has been criticized as “more resembl[ing] a spook project than a tool designed by a culture that values accountability or transparency”.[177] As of 2012, 80% of The Tor Project’s $2M annual budget came from the United States government, with the U.S. State Department, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and the National Science Foundation as major contributors,[178] aiming “to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states”.[179] Other public sources of funding include DARPA, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and the Government of Sweden.

[…]

Critics say that Tor is not as secure as it claims,[185] pointing to U.S. law enforcement’s investigations and shutdowns of Tor-using sites such as web-hosting company Freedom Hosting and online marketplace Silk Road.

But also…

In October 2013, after analyzing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, The Guardian reported that the NSA had repeatedly tried to crack Tor and had failed to break its core security, although it had had some success attacking the computers of individual Tor users.[27] The Guardian also published a 2012 NSA classified slide deck, entitled “Tor Stinks”, which said: “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time”, but “with manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users”.[186] When Tor users are arrested, it is typically due to human error, not to the core technology being hacked or cracked.

[…]

A late 2014 report by Der Spiegel using a new cache of Snowden leaks revealed, however, that as of 2012 the NSA deemed Tor on its own as a “major threat” to its mission, and when used in conjunction with other privacy tools such as OTR, Cspace, ZRTP, RedPhone, Tails, and TrueCrypt was ranked as “catastrophic,” leading to a “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence…”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)

YMMV, and your implementation and usage matter.

*looks inside*

oh, it’s Uyghur slave labor again

scrape’em off, Jim!

Would it? I’ve seen some videos here of people absolutely harassing lone ICE agents in cars sitting in parking lots, and those guys just drove off as fast as they could manage.

If you have a crowd of 20+ people around the car, not doing anything directed at the occupant, just kind of hanging around the outside, plus cameras taking video and actively posting it to social media because, hey, flash mob!.. what then?

The IT worker pipeline:

help desk > sysadmin > CTO/CISO > goat farmer

Hmm, the timing of this statement about human rights suddenly makes a lot of sense.

Suddenly I’m having visions of the flash mob trend returning with purpose.

Anywhere an ICE agent is sitting in a parking lot… suddenly showtunes and choreographed dancing, or just a block party, all around them.

Punitive measures might feel emotionally satisfying in the moment, but what they actually incentivize is hiding the corruption and exploitation better (avoiding getting caught, rather than avoiding the bad activity in the first place). Also, while an angry mob might have a taste for violence and actually perform it for a little while, it doesn’t last and it’s not a basis for a stable government or economy.

If you want long-term stability you have to organize a system so that it incentivizes the behaviors that you want, even more than it disincentivizes the behaviors that you don’t want.

I’m not sure what that looks like in this context, in a practical sense. But ultimately the problem is that everything in our society rewards the hoarding of wealth. This is not just a problem with capitalism - every communist or supposedly socialist society ever established also rewarded hoarding of wealth.

For things to be different, actually different, a different value system with a fundamentally different reward structure needs to be established, and it needs to be competitive long-term with the current system in order to exist alongside it and/or eventually replace it.

Like I said I don’t really know what that looks like in practice. The only example I can think of is the “gift economy” described in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Green Mars, in which the participants in every exchange always seek to give more than they get (essentially the reverse of normal behavior).

Heh, so ALSA has kind of been the audio architecture for Linux distros since forever.

Pulse Audio was supposed to modernize audio for Linux and ultimately replace ALSA.

But last time I installed Linux on my desktop, I couldn’t get audio output from my motherboard’s TOSLINK S/PDIF port no matter which settings I changed in the GUI, uninstalled/reinstalled drivers and codecs and whatnot, etc.

Nothing made any difference until I eventually found some forum post which suggested using ALSAmixer to check the settings for various audio channels. ALSAmixer is not typically installed by default and not commonly used anymore, but it was the only tool that could unmute the digital audio output channel that served the TOSLINK port - that functionality was not present anywhere else in any of the configuration options. Pulse appeared to be in control of the system audio hardware, but in reality it was just sitting on top of and still relying on ALSA to handle the back end. Also, whoever set ALSA to mute some audio channels by default on a clean install… wtf dude, that shit just makes people think their hardware isn’t properly supported and they have a driver issue.

The point being, ALSA was supposed to be deprecated years ago and all of the old audio issues resolved and modernized with a new architecture, but… I’ll believe it when I see it, when whatever the new thing is actually proves itself to be an all-singing, all-dancing audio architecture. I’ve seen this rodeo before, and last time I checked it was still a clownshow.

No no, see the GNU GPL is copyleft:

The licenses in the GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

So if (stressing the if) output from an AI that was trained on GPL code is considered a derivative work, then it must also be licensed as GNU GPL. That makes it open source, but not unlicensed.

GNU GPL is intentionally insidious this way, it prevents corporate profiteering from GPL projects because any derivative work must use the same license.

The question is whether a court decision would uphold that AI generated code based on GPL code training counts as a derivative work. This decision regarding generated art seems like it might set a precedent for that.

you can’t really bomb a supply chain

Fuck yeah you can, hence my example of bombing ball bearing factories.

Train lines are also a classic bombing target. Fuel production/refining/storage/transport, any kind of logistics hub, shipyards, airstrips, warehouses… all things that are difficult to hide because there’s always activity around them. Flatten them and the dependent supply chain grinds to a halt.

You running Windows Vista on an HP desktop with a Zip drive in 2026?

Your company isn’t taking you or your work seriously, so yeah you shouldn’t either.

China and Russia both trade heavily with Iran and don’t care about embargoes.

Also even if they could produce everything they need within the country, that doesn’t mean it’s practical to produce it all in one location. At some point you have to pull raw material out of the ground and refine it, and you probably can’t get everything you need all from the same hole in the ground. You probably can’t manufacture electronics very well next door to a mining and refining operation. There’s going to be truck routes or train lines and logistics facilities somewhere.

Heh, this would be fantastic and I think technically in line with the GNU GPL - all code produced from GPL code must also be licensed as GPL. Therefore the output of any model that trained on any GPL code would also be GPL.

Open source all the things!

off the starboard bow

It’s too early to have much data, but there is some evidence that GLP-1 blockers are exacerbating eating disorders like anorexia:

https://shmabstracts.org/abstract/glp-1-induced-anorexia-what-to-do-when-the-medicine-works-too-well/

Which makes sense - the drugs make you feel like you don’t need to eat, so you don’t eat. If you were already not eating enough, it amplifies that.