When you’re out in the field and your FOSS product suddenly has a glitch, who runs tech support for you?

FOSS is great for some things but this isn’t necessarily one of them.

Or just use one of the many Ubuntu derivatives that don’t force Snap?

Maybe - and hear me out - it’s the dogs that are the problem?

“Can’t control their prey drive” is a bad excuse. You control your dog or you don’t deserve to have one. End of story. A dog barking endlessly is the responsibility of the owner to control or get rid of their damn dog.

It isn’t hard to teach your dog not to be a nuisance. I’ve done it before. Blaming the dog because you failed to teach/control it is not correct, and simply shows that you do not have what it takes to be a dog owner.

I have in the past, but I also almost fell over.

Every once in a while I’ll just get incredibly lightheaded and I’m not able to talk or even think. I usually lose balance too and need to brace myself against something. It’ll last like 30 seconds and then go away. They come on with no warning and I can’t even say anything.

I’ve never been able to figure out what causes it. It happens rarely, like once every 3-4 years.

You do realize that just makes you look, like, actually insane, right?

Like, that in combination with everything else you wrote just makes it seem like mad ramblings and sort of discounts anything you have to say since you’re leading an angry rant with “put someone else’s poop in your butt”.

And then when you say you’ve been banned from multiple sites and it’s all a grand conspiracy from Reddit to be out to get you, people are just going to think “this guy opened the article by suggesting you shove someone else’s poop in your butt.”

I know there are studies blah blah blah. But you understand how this looks, right?

It was pretty much used the way people use Discord with a group of friends today. It didn’t have servers or anything like that, but you could hop on a call with a couple of buds and play games together.

I played a lot of Halo Custom Edition over Xfire back in the day…

Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.

The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I’m sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I’ve spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it’s pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we’d have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it’s been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn’t an option obviously since it’s run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they’d like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It’s also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)

I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I’m thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they’ve simply not been the best stewards of the project - it’s succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.

That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).

Kbin’s federation with Mastodon works as you’d expect it to work.

I don’t know why Lemmy insists on such bad integration with Mastodon. Last I checked, the Lemmy devs were insisting on not having smooth integration with Mastodon.

Doesnt make much sense when you can create a second account on Mastodon or one of many other platforms which already implement user following much better.

It’s one reason why I jumped to Kbin and have been using it for the past few months. Kbin does indeed support user following much better -and it supports threads showing up in Mastodon much better too.

Here’s a video from an all-hands meeting the day after she quit. (Reddit, sorry.)

The following is a transcript if you’d rather avoid Reddit:

(speaker 1, Linus) So we called this meeting because it’s come to our attention that we need to have a quick chat about the best way to handle HR related feedback and rumors. We won’t be giving any names for what I hope are extraordinarily obvious reasons, but what we can do is give you the following guidelines for problem solving and conflict resolution.

Sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but here we are. Number one, always stand up for what’s right. We’re only a team as long as we’re all working together and working for each other. That’s the most important one. Number two, always reflect on your own personal experiences and use your common sense. Few things in life are truly black and white. Number three, always wait to hear both sides of a story before passing your own judgment. Be cautious when you know that one side is bound by legal and ethical disclosure guidelines, when the other is not. Carefully consider what it says about the character of someone who would engage in that type of gossip against someone who has no power to defend themselves.

Number four, always encourage openness and transparency. If you have a problem, you need to speak up. We want to fix it. If you receive feedback about somebody else at this company, the first response is, have you spoken with this person? Followed closely by, you need to speak with this person. We don’t solve interpersonal issues here, or really anywhere in your life, if you wish to live in a drama free zone, by engaging in water cooler politicking. So, if for any reason that individual is not comfortable approaching the person they’re having a conflict with, we have a chain that they’re supposed to follow.

So first, you advise them to take the problem to their manager. Followed by me or Yvonne, followed by our third party HR firm. I hope that you all trust that we’re here to make this a safe, fun, and productive workplace, and we won’t tolerate mistreatment of any of our team members.

If you have any reason to believe otherwise, then I refer you again to point number four, which is to address the issue with the individual directly, or bring it to me or Yvonne, or bring it to our third party HR firm. Since I’m not at liberty to share any details about what occurred, uh, all I can do is ask that you trust me and Yvonne.

Um, some of you know us very well, I’ve been here a very long time, um, some of you have not been here for as long, but I like to think that whether you’ve been here for nine years or nine days, you’re here for a reason and you believe that we are utmost to run this company with integrity and compassion.

Um, We can’t solve problems we don’t know about though, so on that note, I’d like to invite anyone who has concerns about a fellow team member or about a manager to submit their feedback either by speaking with their manager, me or Yvonne directly, or if you would prefer to provide your feedback anonymously, we have an option for that as well.

It’s the manager and co-worker feedback form. Uh, Yvonne, if you’re not aware of it - show of hands who is not aware of it? Hey, a lot of people aren’t aware of it. Good, so now we all know. There’s an anonymous form, if for whatever reason you’re not comfortable either talking to me me or Yvonne directly about it - and that’s okay, that’s fine, we understand, that’s why we have these options - Yvonne’s gonna post it in the general chat.

It’s a safe space to provide us ideas for improvement, or if you’re consumed by the holiday spirit and you want to say nice things, you can do that too. Does anybody else have any questions?

Not a single question? Wow, that must have been a really good speech.

(speaker 2, James) You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?

(speaker 1, Linus) That’s it! So, um, Yvonne, did you have anything you wanted to add?

(speaker 3, Yvonne) (inaudible) Somebody said (inaudible) if you guys want to sanitize your hands, help yourself with free (inaudible)?

(speaker 1, Linus) Yeah, that was actually just totally random timing. It came up the stairs a moment ago. Dennis is on it. Alright. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful and, uh, productive rest of your day. And weekend.

Removed by mod

I use Flatpak all the time. It works a lot better than native apps very often.

Also it’s a lot easier than fussing with PPAs or whatever. I’m on KDE Neon and wanted to run something through Wine. The Wine in the stock PPAs was an older version with a known bug that wouldn’t let me install the .NET Framework 4.8. I tried fetching the Wine PPA directly, but then I was getting issues about system packages not being compatible with newer versions of Wine.

The more I dug, the more issues popped up (typical Linux). So I gave up and decided to install Lutris and try it through there, since Lutris has a workaround for those Wine issues. The Lutris in the stock PPAs also was an old version with a known bug where it just… wouldn’t work. You’d click a button and nothing would happen because of an HTTP bug. Rather than fuss around with that, I gave up and installed the Lutris Flatpak.

30 seconds later, my program was installed and running. No nonsense in the command line, no fussing around with packages. Just open and go.

A majority of the programs I have are Flatpak now. I have Flatpak for Zoom to let me take work meetings from my Linux partition; I have Flatpak for Parsec to let me remote in to my work desktop from my Linux partition. Blender, Calibre, Chrome, Discord, Thunderbird, PrusaSlicer, Slack, Rider, VS Code… all Flatpak.

They all work great. I get prompt updates to stay on the bleeding edge. No more dependency hell. I now actively search for Flatpaks before I fall back to apt.

That’s because they check your user agent.

This API aims to break those kinds of extensions, making it impossible to spoof a user agent or certain kind of machine.

The idea is that it would be similar to hardware attestation in Android. In fact, that’s where Google got the idea from.

Basically, this is the way it works:

• You download a web browser or another program (possibly even one baked into the OS, e.g. working alongside/relying on the TPM stuff from the BIOS). This is the “attester”. Attesters have a private key that they sign things with. This private key is baked into the binary of the attester (so you can’t patch the binary).

• A web page sends some data to the attester. Every request the web page sends will vary slightly, so an attestation can only be used for one request - you cannot intercept a “good” attestation and reuse it elsewhere. The ways attesters can respond may vary so you can’t just extract the encryption key and sign your own stuff - it wouldn’t work when you get a different request.

• The attester takes that data and verifies that the device is running stuff that corresponds to the specs published by the attester - “this browser, this OS, not a VM, not Wine, is not running this program, no ad blocker, subject to these rate limits,” etc.

• If it meets the requirements, the attester uses their private key to sign. (Remember that you can’t patch out the requirements check without changing the private key and thus invalidating everything.)

• The signed data is sent back to the web page, alongside as much information as the attester wants to provide. This information will match the signature, and can be verified using a public key.

• The web page looks at the data and decides whether to trust the verdict or not. If something looks sketchy, the web page has the right to refuse to send any further data.

They also say they want to err towards having fewer checks, rather than many (“low entropy”). There are concerns about this being used for fingerprinting/tracking, and high entropy would allow for that. (Note that this does explicitly contradict the point the authors made earlier, that “Including more information in the verdict will cover a wider range of use cases without locking out older devices.”)

That said - we all know where this will go. If Edge is made an attester, it will not be low entropy. Low entropy makes it harder to track, which benefits Google as they have their own ways of tracking users due to a near-monopoly over the web. Google doesn’t want to give rivals a good way to compete with user tracking, which is why they’re pushing “low-entropy” under the guise of privacy. Microsoft is incentivized to go high-entropy as it gives a better fingerprint. If the attestation server is built into Windows, we have the same thing.

People don’t want to sell their personal data for currency.

People need currency. There is only a finite amount of currency in the world. Power structures are formed because some people have currency and other people need currency.

People are forced to do things like sell their bodies, sell their organs, and - yes - sell their biometric data. Because they need currency to survive. You don’t see billionaires lining up for this.

It’s exploitation of those who are most desperate. You can argue that there’s the systemic problem - that there shouldn’t be billionaires alongside people who are starving and need to sell their bodies - but that isn’t being solved anytime soon.

But exploiting this systemic problem, using it as leverage to convince millions of poor folks to sell their biometric data… that’s immoral. It’s immoral to take advantage of desperation just to line your own pockets.

Why do you think you’re hearing about this from some of the poorest countries in the world?

They’ve invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it’s going to waste.

Also, CEOs tend to be extroverts who want to be around people. They’re also sociopaths who think everyone is like them (or they don’t care what others think).

Combine the two and you get this.

Louder for the people in the back!

Tankies 👏 are 👏 not 👏 true 👏 communists 👏.

God, I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I didn’t realize Lemmy.world still federated with Lemmygrad.

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

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP),[3] officially the Communist Party of China (CPC),[4] is the founding and sole ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)

CCP is a valid name for it in English, and in fact is the way that it’s referred to most of the time in English (which we are speaking currently). You can also see that Wikipedia uses CCP throughout.

Not surprised I’ve pissed off half of Lemmygrad considering you guys are so misinformed you don’t even recognize a common English acronym for the ruling party of the country you adore so much. Stay mad, tankies.

I love how I literally trotted out a source, and you still clamed it was “unsourced”. I also love “You have not made an argument that they are factually similar” after I just explained how they are in practice, factually similar. Here is a Wikipedia page about the genocide China is committing, btw - how is this different than Auschwitz?

But those claims are “western” and therefore automatically incorrect. Because we know China has a free press and open reporting! Their 1982 constitution protects freedom of speech, which is why they arrest people who talk about Tibet!

So here’s a non-western source: Al-Jazeera stating that China has internment camps where they are committing genocide.

You’re not going to listen to any of this, because you’ve completely missed the point. My point is modern communism has not gotten anywhere near the ideals espoused by Marx, and has outright rejected them (paying them lip service at best). It has been replaced by something pretty much identical to fascism, and tankies love it. Since evidently you need a reminder as to what fascism is:

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Everything other than “far-right” can apply to the CCP in its modern form. (And even saying China isn’t far-right is debatable… gay marriage is illegal in China still. Hardly “socially left”.)

• Authoritarian: Elections in the People’s Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people’s congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP.

• Ultranationalist: Using Chinese nationalism, the CCP began to suppress separatism and secessionist attitudes in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and among the Uyghurs, a Turkic minority in the far-west province of Xinjiang, an issue that persists. (Also: Taiwan.)

• Dictatorial leader: China’s Xi allowed to remain ‘president for life’ as term limits removed

• Centralized autocracy: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

• Militarism: Chinese coastguard and navy ships intruded into Malaysian waters in the disputed South China Sea 89 times between 2016 to 2019, and often remained in the area even after being turned away by the Malaysian navy. (See also: Taiwan.)

• Forcible suppression of opposition: The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, during 1989. The protests started on 15 April and lasted until 4 June, at which point Chinese government troops carried out a crackdown on the demonstrators around the city and the Square in what is often referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre. (Better scrub your history for that one before the CCP sees that link)

• Belief in a natural social hierarchy: Han nationalism is a form of ethnic nationalism asserting ethnically Han people as the exclusive constituents of the Chinese nation. (See also: Genocides against non-Han, as mentioned above)

• Subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race: Chinese workers allege forced labor, abuses in Xi’s ‘Belt and Road’ program.

• Strong regimentation of society and the economy: While the Chinese economy maintains a large state sector, the state-owned enterprises operate like private-sector firms and retain all profits without remitting them to the government to benefit the entire population.

But go on. Tell me that’s not fascism.

Conveniently ignores the genocide and organ-harvesting happening today in the largest communist country on the planet

I’m a leftist myself, but tankies are a bridge too far. The moment a movement starts oppressing the proletariat is when they lose all legitimacy. Stalin, Mao, and everyone else the tankies idolize were oppressive to the common people they tried to protect. Modern-day China is oppressive to the point where they set up secret police in other countries to monitor citizens abroad.

How on earth is that protecting the workers? Now there’s just a new class of bourgeoise, the party leadership who enshrine themselves in perpetual power while they exploit the workers in the sweatshops making cheap goods. The party takes their labor, exports it to the West, and lines their own pockets.

That’s what tankies want? How on earth is that any different than fascism, in practice?

Tankies, fascists. Close enough to the same thing tbh.

Any platform which supports tankies is in itself tankie. If they want “unity,” they wouldn’t associate themselves with people who don’t believe in the core fundamentals of freedom. Otherwise they’re just like PCM where the worst elements will take over.