Most of Facebook runs on Linux.

And Brexit as wordplay was just a rehash of the prior Grexit moment Greece had…

The jargon-abuse in this little subthread has caused me actual physical pain. It burns.

But I remember the old saying that you lose your sense of smell while you sleep (or at least in the deep phase of the cycle). Apparently that was why unattended fires late at night are so dangerous because you lose your early-warning system of smelling smoke, so by the time you wake coughing (if you even wake) it is often too late. Admittedly my “knowledge” of that is anecdotal, from long ago, so anyone more knowledgeable feel free to correct me - I won’t take it personally.

In case it is relevant to your case too, I’ll mention I have this problem when I use them (or firefox) over my VPN’s “normal” connections (yet YT over chromium still works), yet they all work fine over my VPN’s “P2P-friendly” connections. I haven’t had time to diagnose exactly why though…

Or maybe this just makes for a great origin-story for becoming an epic Batman-like vigilante. I’m waiting to see his next career take off…

Yet, although this exhibits strong The Onion energy, strictly speaking this could be posted in Not The Onion. Names matter, and I would love to be a fly on the wall witnessing the momentary meltdowns when people read this there…

I’ve been scrolling the comments on this post for a while (longer than I should) and just want to say it is one of the most refreshing collective displays of thoughtfulness and empathy I have read online in far too long. Even the back-and-forwards where people disagree on details or semantics are still overwhelmingly positive, insightful, and respectable on all sides. Another comment here used a brilliant term “merciless insincerity”, and personally I’ve been leaning in a dangerously cynical direction lately about its prevalence. Although I know I am old & resilient enough to not let it capsize me I despise when so much lowest-common-denominator thinking hardens my shell and wallpapers a layer of apathy over who I really am (the angry-yet-optimistic teenager from the 80s/90s who screamed into the void about the climate-emergency, the corrosion of democracy by short-term vote-winning & fundraising, and - more relevantly - the toxicifying impact men and women have had on society - at interpersonal, familial, regional, national, and international scales - by regurgitating thoughtless archetypes and flagwaving in lieu of questioning reality from a fearless standpoint of “open-minded but critical, optimistic but sceptical, confident but fallibilistic”. Discussions like these are some of the very few bastions of antidote left for that cynicism and apathy. What blows my mind is that it is apparent a nontrivial proportion of you who are young (well, much younger than me) are introspecting and expressing yourselves about the subject better than I ever could. When I see the flood of toxic (and idiotically childish) nonsense almost everywhere else, discussions like these truly help bolster a dangerously scarce resource called “hope for the future”, and reinforces for me why about 99.9℅ of my “social online reading” time is spent on Lemmy lately. Gandhi said “be the change you wish to see in the world”, and it’s worth considering that what you are all writing here is a good example of you doing exactly that (even if you hadn’t realised or intended). It adds up, when groups of people give each other the chance to be truly unafraid (instead of “playing tough” - which merely broadcasts how truly afraid someone really is).

That term “merciless insincerity” is an amazingly concise yet thorough way to capture one of the pervasive things I get most frustrated by (across the many countries I’ve lived in, so it is not a georestricted behaviour). Whenever I try to describe it I get too wordy. I’m stealing that.

This is an awesome TIL. I’m tempted to take a stab at introducing “thou” into my daily verbiage. I am wholly aware I’d sound like a pretentious prat, but still… :-)

Exactly. Often when people spout fundamentalist (i.e. stridently unlistening) opinions about abortion, porn, and other hot-button topics like (fundamentalist AKA naive) capitalism, etc I wish they would just study some of the spectacular historical failures at iron-fist methods (orthogonally to their respective ethical for/against arguments). The (alcohol) prohibition and “war on drugs” should be enough reference material alone to see that they don’t achieve their stated goals, they just increase income for the people with a hazy enough moral code to play the system. Eventually it ends up looking like the primary goal often is in fact increasing said income…

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

I long ago stopped getting caught up in “that discussion” about recent trends despite a stream of people lobbing leading questions to get the ball rolling. Because I also try to not do so more rudely than necessary, I have developed several diplomatically worded (or at least ambiguous enough to float opaquely off to the side of the offense spectrum) ways of essentially saying the following: The simplest and cheapest way of [A] learning the “computer science” end of software is by becoming proficient in Lisp, [B] learning the “engineering” end of software by becoming proficient in Forth, [C] learning how “busywork” is a dangerous and demoralising thing to confuse with “actual work” by maintaining some Java code, [D] learning how insidious and self-sabotaging “expert beginner syndrome” is by reading a lot of the relevent code-reviews and blogposts when maintaining Javascript & Python projects, [E] learning how mob-mentality and populism can lead to selective blindness and architectural stubbornness by working with large volumes of C & C++ code, [F] learning how it is all really abstraction-layers over something akin to an old-shool phone switchboard by working with Assembler, [G] learning how the only work with longevity is that which stands on the shoulders of giants by using Fortran libraries, [H] learning how the mere act of developing using languages with baked-in discipline can be inherently educational by using DbC/TDD/BDD/dependent-type/formally-verifying/etc based languages (SPARK-Ada, Haskell, Eiffel, ACL2, Rust, etc), and then [I] learning how - after a certain level of experience - the languages, frameworks, and tools become less important than the engineers’s mindset and the work that happens both before and after the fingers hit the keyboard…by finding semi-performant techniques for implementing masochistic things like a VM and a network stack in Bash script (as hobby tasks, not for real use). If they are coming from a more hands-on/hardware background I also recommend [J] how eye-opening it is to maintain your own customized LibreCMC image flashed onto an open router (the older/smaller the HW the better, because you have to be increasingly creative with your kernel & OS configs), and [K] how educational it is getting a RISC-V working on an FPGA. I top it off by saying that [L] despite coding on-and-off since my start with z80 assembler on an Amstrad in the mid-80s I still feel like a beginner with so much to learn, and [M] that fact is by far the part I love most about the field (not just field of “work” but of “mental endeavour”) - far more than status/seniority/raises. I find I don’t get bombarded so much with JS-framework-du-jour zealotry and expert-beginnerism after that.

const isEven = (n) => !(n & 1)

It seems the technique you’re describing is a kind of societal “good cop, bad cop”. Similar scenario to an interrogation too (trying to get information from someone who does not want to share the information) because in this case the challenge is “how to get people to share the capacity for self-determination, quality of living, and dignity when they clearly prefer to hoard it, even to the detriment of others”.

My youth was at least partly misspent hacking z80 assembler on an Amstrad CPC664. Not as many regrets as one might assume. I miss when (8-bit) assembler was simple enough to hand-code without playing “surf the reference manual”.

…which is very much by design. The “Ownership Class” have understood the value of “Targeted Divide and Conquer” for a while now. A line from Metallica’s Master of Puppets comes to mind: Keep them tired it makes them well.

Although I entirely agree with the spirit of your point I’d like to add a long-winded side-note (essentially “and also”, not “but”). I guess when treated as a “title” Veganism is an inherently philosophical stance, but many conflate “Veganism” with “Having A Strictly Vegan Diet/Lifestyle” so my comment is for those people. Some who identify with the latter of the two (like myself) may be as such - or at least have become as such - for various other “logical reasons”. In the early-90s I inadvertantly became “mostly vegetarian, sometimes pescaterian” due to living with a vegetarian girlfriend. Working in an extremely physically strenuous career, and also coming from a childhood littered with various unexplainable health “issues”, I noticed (with hindsight) huge and surprising physiological benefits from that change. Due to that, and reading about how fundamental human classifying parameters are at the very herbivorous end of the spectrum (nails not claws, very long intestines, low-acidity digestive system which struggles to break down harder animal cell-walls in food, sweating through skin not tongue, mostly non-canine teeth, not having predatory close-set eyes, etc), I proceeded within a year to full vegetarianism - this time consciously. It took years to overcome the n00b mistakes (lack of nutritional knowledge, cooking skills, motivation) that usually eventually turn people back off vegetarianism, and at that point as some of the “fog of war” cleared I noticed a few lingering “issues” from my youth. I had researched food intolerances so did a test to find I was moderately intolerant to 3 types of meat and a few other odd things, and more importantly strongly intolerant to milk (and milk products). The followup consultant told me such a strong reaction indicates all animal-milk would be problematic, not just cow’s. That prompted going vegan in about 2013, with such a dramatic further health-improvement I had to tell myself not to obsess with “if only I’d known this 30 years ago”. Even though I have since become increasingly “philosophically vegan” through a kind of mental osmosis, the point I want to make here is that was really post-hoc, as a side-effect. My original drivers were “purely by accident, then conscious but for functional reasons”. These days - nearly 30 years after going vegetarian and more than 10 years after going vegan - I just do some resistance/weight-training each morning yet I’m far more healthy and “built” than I ever was throughout an effectively “acrobatic” career (even when training for that career 45hrs/week and eating half-kilo mincemeat-based meals as a teenager), even though I ended that career years ago. Those are also very “logical reasons” in addition to the usual “logical ethical vegan reasons regarding treatment of animals”, as also are the “logical ecological reasons” too (particularly the extreme amount of deforestation that is done to create grazing land for livestock).

I guess that makes us screen-siblings, or screen-cousins, perhaps. Maybe we should print up some T-shirts celebrating The One True Way. Maybe some flyers for a recruitment-drive.

If you’re only talking about Storage (data at rest) or Network (data in transit) then encrypt/decrypt offsite and never let symmetric keys (or asymmetric private keys) near the VPS, or for in-transit you could similarly setup encrypted tunnels (symmetric/private keys offsite only) where neither end of the tunnel terminates at the VPS. If you’re talking about Compute then whatever does the processing inherently needs access to decrypted data (in RAM, cache, etc) to do anything meaningful. Although there are lots of methods for delegating, compartmentalising, obfuscating, etc (like enclaves, TPM/vTPM…) the unavoidable truth is that you must trust whomever owns the base-infra ultimately processing your data. The one vaguely useful way to use “other people’s computers” trustlessly is with SMPC (secure multi-party computation) spread sufficiently widely across multiple independent (preferably competing - or even adversarial!) virtual-computation providers, with an “N-of-M keys” policy that avoids any single provider being able to attain a meaningful level of access to your data independently, or being able to view tangible portions of your data while providing functionality during SMPC. That stuff gets super-niche though.