Librewolf is Firefox for thoughtful people. It might cause a few aggravations at times, but thoughtful people understand that is not Librewolf’s fault, that is at the very least shitty apathy and usually malicious intent on behalf of the vast majority of websites on the internet. It does a pretty good job making things work anyway despite the evil, but it’s really not Librewolf’s fault that it doesn’t submit to evil by default.

They’re trying to thread a needle, because they want to have their cake and eat it too. They’re not succeeding. They’re never going to. Either they are on the side of defending society and civilization, or they are trying to destroy society and civilization and profit from it. They think they can find a middle ground when there is no middle ground left anymore. The wealth gap has sprawled open into an impossible and still growing chasm that nobody can stand in anymore. That’s where the middle ground used to be. Now, it’s class war, us against them, and I find it hard to believe they’ll ever do the right thing or pick the right side. So they can keep trying to thread that needle if they want. It will do them no good. Their thread is too thick to fit. They have lost their social license to operate. They are not getting it back. Not from me, anyway.

Nvidia P40s with 24GB VRAM are relatively cheap for what they are and are available in bulk. They have no video output, no cooling (you can 3d print a duct for fans or probably buy one, or just lower the power limits and run them semi-passively until they start throttling)

If you want to putter around a bit with machine learning technologies (I refuse to call it “AI” because it’s not) they’re useful and reasonably capable tools, although far from the fastest compared to what’s out there nowadays.

I am not implying that anything will happen to them anytime soon, and as you suggest they may even profit in the short term, but I do think they might end up with a shortened lifespan eventually, or if they’re particularly lucky, just a significantly less free one.

I think this is an interesting perspective that aligns with some of my current views on AI. It absolutely does pose some very clear questions about intentionality and defining what we actually value in life. Although, I think if we were willing to put in the effort on simply not doing a lot of the “non-valuable thinking” that we are “supposed to be” or “feeling like we have to be” outsourcing to shitty AI, the world would be a much better place and also one that needs very little environmentally destructive AI usage to thrive. Why the fuck do I need project management if nobody but me actually cares when, or if the project ever gets done? Am I doing this for other people or am I doing this for myself? Time is money? Maybe, but money is also the root of all evil. I’d rather take my time back, let the schedule go fuck itself, and it’ll be done when it’s done and whenever I feel like it, or if I feel like it. Maybe that’s not a great way to run a business, but it’s a great way to run my life, and business can go fuck itself too.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even your worst enemy will sometimes agree with you. Social media may not be automatically bad but effectively all for-profit implementations are irredeemably corrupted and a catastrophic danger to the fabric of democracy and civilization. Banning it will not eliminate it but it is the only viable harm reduction strategy we have available for any of us at this point. Techbro dominance and devastating levels of abuse by cynical, manipulative actors has robbed us of the luxury of choosing any more reasonable, nuanced approaches.

Minnesota is already honorary Canadian and in my opinion, always has been.

Constitutions are made up by people and people can change them. All you need to do is either get everyone to agree, or make sure the people who don’t agree can’t stop you. Trump chose the latter, and has completely ignored and dismantled the US constitution. Whatever comes out the other side is going to be very, very different. I’m not saying that we should do that. But in the face of an existential threat like that, I don’t think it’s beyond reason that we could, in fact, get everyone to agree. It’s amazing how staring mutual death and dissolution in the face can change the bitterest of rivalries into if not perfect alignment, at least a functional working relationship. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.

Obligatory Canadian surprise: Canada has actual functioning warships that are not, at this moment, being repaired from fire or other catastrophic failure or mothballed from lack of funding? Jeez, maybe we really are starting to take things seriously.

I’m excited, we’re starting to hear those little bubbles popping… pop… pop… pop… and they’re getting louder… just wait, it’s coming.

I ran Matrix for like a year, and pretty much hated every minute. It was fragile, complicated, and incredibly, bafflingly resource intensive. Matrix is an overengineered nightmare in my opinion, and it seems to be quickly distancing itself from self-hosters while pursuing enterprise usage. Neat technology, horrible implementation, misguided company.

XMPP is a breath of fresh air in comparison. Just like we still use email everywhere (even for authentication nowadays, fun!), XMPP is not obsolete simply because it’s older. It’s a solid foundation, plenty extensible, and does almost everything I can imagine needing to do without unnecessary complexity.

Matrix’s bridges are its killer feature, and it’s nice… when it works. But it’s simply not worth the headache of dealing with Matrix, in my opinion.

If the polls are rigged, does that imply that most Israelis don’t support the genocide? So … you think you’ve got a majority of people who don’t support the genocide and with that majority you plan to do … nothing? Just gonna … let the minority do what they want?

There’s a word for that, the word is “support”. You might not think you’re supporting it, but if you’re not doing something to fight it, then yes, you are supporting it. Get to work. Nobody ever promised that doing the right thing has to be easy.

Lots of enabling in your comment.

People like you, with no control over the big decisions. Just like Palestinians can’t control Hamas, Russians can’t control Putin, US citizens can’t control Trump, and so on.

If people can’t control their own governments, who can? Who should? Other people’s governments? Is that how you think it’s supposed to work? That’s why Israel is obliterating Gaza? Because Gaza can’t get rid of Hamas themselves so Israel is going to do it for them? Do you think that is justified and the right way to do things? Is it Canada’s job to rescue the US? Is it Europe’s responsibility to stop Russia?

Are Iranians responsible for the Iranian regime? Yes, they are, that’s why they’re fucking protesting and dying in the streets right now. Resist, fight back, don’t comply, undermine your illegitimate government until they can be toppled.

Take responsibility. I am responsible for the actions of my government and my country. And so are you. You will be held responsible. And you should be. Other countries are not responsible for fixing your shit. You are. Fix it. Figure out how. Stop acting like it’s somebody else’s problem and you are just a humble peasant. Humble peasants can start revolutions. Lazy citizens who are happy with the status quo while pretending they don’t agree with it do not start revolutions. Which one are you?

“I AM THE LAW” --Judge Dredd

I don’t want the free petition websites online getting my personal network’s info and sharing or selling it, hence the interest in self hosting.

So either you’re creating a petition with a size of exactly “1” or you’re asking other people to trust YOU with their personal info instead, or you’re asking for a federated solution (extremely difficult to establish a verifiable web of trust framework, and STILL shares your “personal network’s info” whenever it federates or validates its data to dozens of other servers).

None of these scenarios are viable for creating a petition that anyone is going to take seriously (to the extent that anyone takes petitions seriously at all)

fail2ban mainly, but also things like scaling login delays (some sort of option often built into the software you’re running, but just as often not configured by default), or if you’re feeling particularly paranoid account locking after too many failures, and in general just not using default, predictable, common usernames or weak passwords, and honestly it’s even helped a bit by having slow hardware and throttled network bandwidth.

The goal is to make it so that someone can’t run a script that sends 100 million login attempts per second for common or stolen usernames and passwords and your server just helpfully tries them all and obediently tells them none of those worked… until one of them does.

Not only does this encourage them to TRY sending 100 million login attempts per second because your server isn’t refusing it, which is a huge waste of bandwidth and resources, it also makes it really likely that they’re eventually going to guess one right.

Do any of bunker doors also lock from the outside? Asking for a friend.

I’m just a philosopher being criminally open-minded, don’t take my navel-gazing too personally. I hate AI so much that it has led me into a nihilistic fugue.

Here is the way it used to be done before AI took over, when it was called speech synthesis. How do you know all of these programs were created ethically and responsibly and nobody ever used any pirated software or infringed any patents or copyright? You don’t, some people maybe did, but it’s probably okay these days.

You can also find reasonably responsibly trained machine learning models that are open and able to run locally. Nobody’s going to promise there was never any part of it that was trained on data you wouldn’t approve of. There’s simply no way to tell. We don’t have any system capable of identifying or defining who is consenting or what they are consenting to.

So, you really have to define this line yourself, and you have to understand that nothing’s going to be done perfectly ethically without question. If you’re willing to compromise a little without having unrealistic expectations, and live in the unfortunate reality that we find ourselves whether we like it or not, you can probably find some free, locally-hosted model that will do a much better and more capable job than any previously mentioned software solution, but you have to accept the risk that even then maybe it’s not as ethically trained as it was claimed to be. We don’t know, nobody can promise or verify that.

There is no ethical free lunch. If you want to avoid “AI” completely you can try to find and hire a real human being to read to you. Even that’s hard, and it’s certainly not immune to perpetuating some form of exploitation. We live in a world of exploitation. You can try your best to minimize the harm you do, but the philosophy gets complicated fast.

And to quote “The Good Place”: this is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.

That’s the problem, When you’re running too many services as it is, you will be staring at a terminal at home sooner or later. Maybe you’ve gotten lucky and haven’t been ravaged by the cruel gods of fate yet, but it absolutely happens, and eventually it will happen to you. When you’re relying on family notifications and disaster response, you don’t get to choose when that happens, and sometimes you’ll have to spend a LONG time staring at a terminal at home. And when it happens often enough, or badly enough, you end up not just staring at the terminal at home, but also thinking about the terminal at home, and losing sleep over it, and that’s just not a great way to live your self-hosting life. I’ve been there.

Making the investment in repeatable, reproducible, maintainable infrastructure now means you get to decide WHEN you’re staring at a terminal, and for exactly how long. Even when you don’t make it through as much progress as you wanted to, you can just close it down without any stress, get back to your life and continue from where you left off next time. You can’t do that, at least not without some significant consequences when your server got hacked and is sending spam or your entire server is refusing to boot and you need the files on it.

You may still have to hit the terminal sometimes when you don’t choose to, but it’s going to be less often, and less complex when you do. That’s when the investment pays off, and your return on investment is the goal of having ultimately less time spent at the terminal at home, and that payoff is especially rewarding if you’re good at prioritizing the time you do choose to spend on the terminal at home, to find low-value moments to effectively repurpose for this hobby, and save the actually valuable times of your life from ever having to be used for emergency maintenance.

I’m really hoping that the magic Carney is doing is all behind the scenes, top-secret, serious powerbroker shit. And if he is, that’s going to be fire.

But if he isn’t, “meh” is an understatement. Because most of what he’s done in public has been typical neoliberal status quo, rape the environment, fuck the people, while telling them how much they’re both going to be enjoying it.

I’ve always believed he’s a sneaky snake. I know he was one to get elected.

The optimist in me wants to believe he’s a sneaky snake working on our side.

The pessimist in me is convinced he’s a sneaky snake working against us.

I guess time will tell us which one is the case.