• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • They should be more neutral in a non-opinion piece. They quote a lot more people saying pro-genocide things than they quote people saying anti-genocide things. They quoted pro-genocide politicians and pro-genocide BBC staff. They did not give the musicians any opportunity to respond to the article.

    Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has inflamed tensions around the world, triggering pro-Palestinian protests in many capitals and on college campuses. Israel and some supporters have described the protests as antisemitic, while critics say Israel uses such descriptions to silence opponents

    Let’s consider the two positions mentioned in this paragraph:

    1. Israel should stop committing genocide

    2. Israel should continue committing genocide, and position 1 is antisemitic

    The first position is described as “pro-Palestinian”, as if these protesters support the Palestinian military (Hamas) and want them to win. This is incorrect. These people mostly just want the genocide to end.

    The second position is a shitty opinion, but also contains an overt falsehood. It’s an objective fact that it’s false, and that fact should be reported in the story, but it isn’t.





  • I think people are more pissed off and divided than they have been in a very long time. It’s hard to say how close we are to a civil war, though. There’s been a lot of propaganda for a long time saying “violence is not the answer” (even though sometimes it is), and “violence has no place in our system of government” (even though the government abuses its own monopoly on violence to imprison and kill innocent, peaceful people).

    It feels like the media in the US is less reliable than it’s ever been in my lifetime, and would probably suppress as much as possible any information that would support open rebellion.



  • I haven’t used it in the last several years, but from about 2014-2018 any time I tried to download, it required registration, and any time I tried to register, it just didn’t work. It was some problem with the javascript in their site. Probably related to captcha or something. Yes, I tried multiple computers, multiple browsers, even tried registering on a library’s computer.

    Looks like their site is less shit now, but it’s still awful.



  • My favorite is Debian, with systemd uninstalled. At this point, you can’t install Debian without systemd, but you can uninstall systemd after OS installation.

    It used to be that most desktop environments in Debian depended on libpam-systemd, which depended on systemd and systemd-sysv. More recently, desktop environments just depend on libpam-elogind and elogind which is only part of systemd, and allows you to use sysvinit.

    I prefer sysvinit mainly because I find it easier to create custom services out of my own programs. My success rate at doing this in systemd is 1/3, and in sysvinit about 10/10.

    I also had a problem where a Debian-based embedded system had some kind of broken NTP client running on startup, and due to systemd, I couldn’t figure out how to disable it. It would set the time to several years into the future, as soon as it first got a network connection on each startup.


  • Mozilla, for example, would sign Firefox’s flatpak with a PGP key that they would disclose on their website. You verify the signature using the RSA algorithm (or any other algorithm for digital signatures. There are a bunch.) Or, you could just trust that your connection wasn’t tampered the first time, then you would have the public key, and it would verify each time that the package came from that same person. Currently, you have to trust every time that your connection isn’t tampered.

    Major flatpak providers (Flathub at the very least) would include their PGP public key in the flatpak software repo, and operating system vendors would distribute that key in the flatpak infrastructure for their operating system, which itself is signed by the operating system’s key.








  • Rejecting Netflix fixes things for you and me, but the article says Netflix has 93 million ad-supported subscribers. I’m really worried about the amount of influence advertisers have on our society, and it’s only getting worse. Even if you and I can be above the direct influence of these ads, many people are not, and those people are influencing you and me. This produces a dangerous secondary influence that can reach most of society, and just fills everyone’s mind with lies, for hardly any cost.