And now I understand why that weirdo was so hellbent on the corporations of the world supporting this

Because the vast majority are just as stupid as the libertarians. They don’t actually know what socialism or even communism is. They just know they were told that capitalism is bad (and… it mostly is) and that if they support this revolution they’ll get everything they want.

Its why so many are hellbent on accelerationism. They think that they’ll become warlords during the civil war and get exactly what they want.

Honestly… yeah.

Hexbear is a no brainer to block but ml was very much “fine” with a high tolerance for tankie idiots. But it feels like the hexbears figure out they are all blocked and are now just moving to ml en masse.

Sucks because there are actually some good users on there. But I just can’t with the swarm of righteous stupidity.

The “vibe” doesn’t really matter. You are getting paid to do a job, you are gonna do it. You can’t refuse to write documents because you have to use Word instead of Google Docs or whatever.

No, it really is the training. Because the most obnoxious thing in the work force is an old white guy. They can’t outright say “no”. But they will do everything in their power to talk about how EVERYTHING is a blocker and they can’t get any work done because nobody wanted to teach them something. Or nobody was able to answer the questions that they refuse to ask. And so forth.

Having a database of training videos or even an outsourced consultant goes a long way toward “Hey Jon? Nobody gives a shit. Do your job”. Whereas having to link to just a document or explain something yourself is how they will actively refuse to ever retain any information.

Things get weird as corporations increasingly have power comparable to nation states.

But, generally, I would rather a megacorporation than a government. Because megacorps are at least “smart enough” to pretend they aren’t trying to take over the world. Whereas governments have a tendency to justify a lot of horrible shit for righteous reasons.

But, in a perfect world? I would rather a wide range of different donors and backers but mostly clustering around maybe fortune 500 companies instead of fortune 10?

My buddies and I have worked at companies that went through similar transitions and reversions.

The issue is not the cost or even the ideology. It is the training and support. There are a LOT of really good training resources for MS Office and, at least for millennials, outright education in k-12. So, by switching to libre office or anything similar, you are suddenly putting a large burden on yourself and random enthusiast youtubers who will start advertising nordvpn partway through explaining what a pivot table is. Because the vast majority of people don’t know how to google “how to edit the footer for slides in Libre Office”

And that RAPIDLY adds up to being a lot more expensive than even the full priced licenses from MS. your more technically competent staff suddenly have very large support burdens because “Oh, I just have a quick question” and that increases their burnout.

That said, it is going to be really interesting in the next 5-10 years (… assuming the world doesn’t end in a series of thermonuclear explosions first) since gen-z are very much brought up on Google Docs and the like. So even MS Office will have a significant training overhead for new hires.

At one of my other jobs we had to migrate a codebase from SVN to Git. it… was incredibly overdue and it was making for a greater burden on new hires who had to learn an antiquated toolset to contribute. But it was a genuine concern because most of the existing developers who understood “where the bodies were buried” had already “suffered through giving up on CVS for no good reason”. And we genuinely had to acknowledge that we would lose staff “on both sides” and, while I am not proud to admit it, more or less set up a few underperforming early career staff to be sacrificial lambs. Making it a point to let Old Fuck #5 know that the guy who was struggling to understanding how to write performant kernels was available to work through how to write a commit message. That way the rock stars who we were dependent on would not put in their notice.

And having a government as a significant backer for an open source project is a great recipe for conflicts of interest and general trust erosion.

Of course not.

As is usual, the mass publishing just makes a smokescreen. Because sure some (a lot) of them were there raping kids. But others just got invited to hang out at one of the most influential people on Earth’s private island and accepted the invite. Maybe they were aware of how fucked it was and maybe they just “got weird vibes” but still made sure to show their face to get the political/social benefits.

But that also means that all the rapists totally were just there because famous rich people told them to be.

Its more or less the story of almost every single wikileaks “drop”. You can’t really get “justice” with broad and indiscriminate data dumps. The most you can hope for is “awareness” but the likely outcome is instead political and social mistrust.

Exactly

We go through cycles of this. People get it in their head that “linux is finally ready for mainstrream desktop usage”. A lot of people “make the change” and then assess it for themselves.

But there is always this crowd of evangelists that insist on either being ridiculously pedantic or downplaying some of the headaches. And this is a perfect example of… both?

On the Windows side? Most people will never notice that. I think MS have reached the point where they don’t even give users a choice after N weeks? You just go down in the middle of watching a naughty video and come up to Cortana turning on all the spyware and telling you to use Edge already.

On “Linux”? It is almost (?) always a series of special commands you provide your package manager and/or upgrade app where it feels like someone is trying to warn you at every step of the way that you WILL destroy your computer. And… it might. I am still not convinced that something didn’t get borked with Fedora and plasma and I probably need to just set aside an hour or two to reformat.

The end result is largely the same (depending on what version and what distro). But it very much goes beyond “numbers are scary” and into “But you said I shouldn’t run random commands I find on the internet with the word ‘sudo’ in them. And now I should?” territory.

Personally? I think this is actually an excellent selling point. I hate that Windows does whatever the hell it wants these days. I like that I am making a conscious effort to update my OS. And, while I dislike them in practice, I think “immutable OSes” are the way to make this palatable for the masses.

There is no one solution that handles everything (or else everyone would just do that). It is always about a mixture of multiple methods.

Is it even legal?

This is the internet. Someone will always claim it is illegal in “Europe”. Nobody will care enough to verify one way or the other. And, regardless of whether it is or is not, companies don’t care because most of those regulations are very toothless either due to bureaucratic inertia or just not giving a fuck.

The fact of the matter is that this is a very common model used by a range of services and it is not going to get challenged any time soon.

It is still a monetary investment which is a major deterrent to bad faith accounts. This is why so many live games have a “you need to spend 1 dollar to get into the good queue” model. Shit like Escape from Tarkov where people buy accounts en masse are very much the exception.

But also? The issue is, like with mots things, lower income users. A lot of the cheaper/more affordable “pay as you go” phone plans won’t support the SMS authentication services that these models depend on. Which is why I referenced Overwatch 2 since that was actually a really “good” example of the reasons this is not a good model.

Which means you likely weren’t invested in engaging in a meaningful manner. That is especially important for filing a bug report on an open source project.

And I guess I just don’t view a phone number as having much value from a privacy standpoint. Basically every number is compromised to the point that it is dependent on your phone/service provider to block spam. One more site having my phone number doesn’t really bother me if it is a site I want to “engage” with.

Also: Never underestimate how much data is already out there just based on what pages you load. Privacy is long since dead and people do not understand how easy it is to cross reference to realize that “Jimmy in The Netherlands” is actually “Jim Stark at 101 Fake Street in Baltimore Maryland whose sister is Susie Clark with facebook username sclark_420”

And Github is Microsoft who need those capabilities for basically every other website they sell.

Whereas gitlab is REALLY good software with… a website nobody ever really asked for but that still needs to exist to sell people that software.

This comes up with a lot of services. I think everyone lost their god damned minds when overwatch added phone verification?

Like, I don’t like it. But I have friends who ahve had to deal with harassment campaigns against their products (or persons) and the like and get why you would do what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask as a way to remove sock puppets.

Policies like that are almost entirely about minimizing fraud and harassment. It really sucks for people who don’t have mobile phones that support authentication texts or whatever (since, even as you pointed out, the requirement is mostly a phone number) but it also drastically cuts down on fake/harassment accounts.

I just use a pretty generic z-wave plug and home assistant. In the past I did more complex setups that actually determine what process is spiking and so forth. But eventually realized that “this is doing a lot of compute…” is a catch all for a LOT of potential issues.

And I guess I don’t understand what you mean by “shouldn’t be wireless”. It is inherently going to be wireless because you will be on your phone on the other side of the planet. If you genuinely suspect you will be vulnerable to attacks of this scale then you… probably have other things to worry about.

But as a safety blanket?

With my firewall disabled a lot of my internal network (including home assistant) will fall over sooner than later.

But that is also a recipe for mass stress. Because I know “something happened”. And now I know “in six hours, I need to check in and make sure that ‘something’ is still not happening”. Which is extra shitty if I got the notification late evening local time.

I have friends/neighbors that I trust to swing by and push a button in the event I need to bring it back up before I get home. But if I have reached the point of “it is possible my wireguard credentials were compromised?” then I really don’t need to be able to download the next episode of ATLA NOW.

Never used it “in anger” but:

I have my firewall plugged into a metered outlet (plugged into a UPS). I have it set up to send me alerts if power draw increases beyond a certain threshold. I’ve tested it and wireguard is measurable (yay) but so are DDOS attacks. If I get that alert, I can choose to turn off that plug and take my whole network offline until I get home and can sort that out.

Gotten a few false positives over the years but mostly that is just texting my partner to ask what they are doing.

Oooooooh.

Thanks. Will take a look to try and figure out their terminology for this.

I think that is the seat based one I see recommended all the time.

I understand that hub and spoke models are inherently questionable security wise and switching to a mesh based approach is probably the answer. But it tends to make for a mess of needing to make sure my various “homelab” servers are aware and so forth.

deleted by creator