Oh yeah of course, the US is an imperialist, neocolonialist power that does a tremendous amount of harm in the world.

I’m an anarchist, so you won’t find me singing the praises of any state power, for sure not the US. They do what all states do, consolidate centralized power and dominate as many people as they can.

My point was that some folks act like anything that opposes the interests of the US is automatically good, and that’s not true, ISIS opposes the US, but they’re a pretty fucked up group of religious extremists, same with the Westboro Baptist Church hate group, who also oppose the US strongly, but are total scumbags.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Isn’t always true. Just because a country/political faction opposes US hegemony doesn’t automatically make them morally superior.

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.”

I would be so far ahead of where I am right now if I had just decided on a course and committed instead of analyzing all the choices to death.

In general, if it isn’t open source in every sense of the term, GPL license, all weights and parts of the model, and all the training data and training methods, it’s a non-starter for me.

I’m not even interested in talking about AI integration unless it passes those initial requirements.

Scraping millions of people’s data and content without their knowledge or consent is morally dubious already.

Taking that data and using it to train proprietary models with secret methodologies, locking it behind a pay wall, then forcing it back onto consumers regardless of what they want in order to artificially boost their stock price and make a handful of people disgustingly wealthy is downright demonic.

Especially because it does almost nothing to enrich our lives. In its current form, it is an anti-human technology.

Now all that being said, if you want to run it totally on your own hardware, to play with and help you with your own tasks, that’s your choice. Using in a way that you have total sovereignty over is good.

Dude, if you wanna believe in ghosts and aliens, just say you think they are real because vibes.

Don’t try to justify it with a clunky, misunderstood, and incorrect usage of “statistics.”

The largest keyboard I use is a 65% and I regularly use my smaller 60% also.

I used to have a Vortex Core 40% that I used as my daily driver. Took a few weeks to get used to the extra layers, but once I practiced with it, I became as natural to type on as any other keyboard.

I think 65% is my favorite size, or a modified 60% with arrow keys. Once I went tenkeyless in college, I could never go back. Smaller and smaller is my life now.

Meanwhile, I saw a post on r/debian a few weeks ago of a user running Debian 12 on a Pentium III server.

My 3rd and 4th gen i7 workstations are also running it like champs.

The issue is structural, there are no “good cops” in the same way there are no “good pimps” or “good slave owners.”

There were some slave owners who were kind to their slaves, taught them to read, allowed them to have some free time and make a small amount of money.

That doesn’t mean that what they were doing was morally acceptable. They still were buying and selling human beings like property.

Policing, especially in the USA is rotten to the core. There are absolutely some cops who are kind people, who become police officers out of a naive belief that they can do good for society as a whole in that profession.

But those people don’t usually last long. They either leave after seeing the ugly underbelly, or they become corrupted by the system. The police will always act in the interest of the rich and powerful, or else they get fired. If they are told to break up a protests, they will always comply. If they are told to block a corporate skyscraper so that protesters cannot get into it to stage a sit-in, they will do it, even as ultra wealthy oligarchs stream safely past them to conduct horrifically corrupt dealings that hurt and kill millions of people across the world.

The cop’s job is also to go around trying to bust people for crimes. If a cop comes up to you out of the blue and starts up a conversation, 99% of the time they are fishing for information, trying to sus something out. They aren’t just trying to be friendly, they are doing their job. In the US at least, the cops are allowed to lie to you in an investigation in order to try to get you to admit guilt. They are allowed and trained to do it, to use all kinds of trickery to manipulate you into a confession, or to get Intel that helps them.

In addition, the examples people frequently cite as good things the cops do would be better done by non-cops. First aid? Suicide intervention? Disaster relief? Theft deterrence? Wellness checks? Those are all things that would be better done by non-cops if we funded and grew those kinds of organizations instead of further militarizing the police.

ACAB has never meant that all cops are evil people, it means that no matter how good of a person a cop is, they will always be empowering a corrupt and evil system.

Why don’t we see the same sentiment about paramedics, firefighters, and heck, even soldiers? Because the systems that those folks are a part of don’t have the same corrupting effect. Even soldiers are generally looked on much more favorably than cops, even though politically and socially, there is a large amount of overlap. Part of this is propaganda, but another factor is the standards soldiers are held to in the US. They are expected to carry themselves extremely well, and can be severely punished, even jailed for misconduct.

As a personal anecdote, I grew up in both worlds. My dad and several members of my family were both in the military and were cops. I was around both cultures a ton. I’ve had many bad encounters with police officers over the years, and that’s with me knowing all the classic, “always keep your hands visible and comply” stuff that my dad and his cop friends told me.

I’ve never had a single negative encounter with an on-duty soldier. They’ve always been extremely respectful and grounded. Like I said, just an anecdote, but interesting to think about. If cops could be fired or even jailed for relatively minor infractions, even have their lives destroyed like soldiers who are dishonorably discharged, ACAB would probably never have became a thing.

Right on!

After about an hour of using the mouse or controller gaming, I have to take a few seconds to massage my hand because it gets sore and stiff.

Didn’t happen until I got into my 30’s 😔

Oh yeah, it’s real. For instance, I constantly have to use black magick as a sys-admin to get my company’s printers to work.

Been a Bitwarden user for several years now, both personal and deployed at multiple small businesses.

It has been fantastic the whole time. Pricing is great, open source, runs on basically everything, and easy to use.

KeypassXC if you’re uber-paranoid or a hardcore Stallmanite, otherwise, Bitwarden all day 100%

Yeah, I’ve seen some wild 40s out there, really sweet.

Oh cool, well it looks awesome! I wanna build my own 40% sometime.

Right on. Yeah, Timeshift isn’t a backup solution, you still need 3-2-1 for your data, but it’s great for as a system-wide Ctrl+Z for mistakes or broken updates.

Use Timeshift! Saved me several times after experimenting a little too much with Debian.

Are you fully conscious but trapped in the body of a guinea pig?

The difference is putting them on because you actually understand the problem you’re trying to treat lol.

Love it! What board did you use? Or is it a pre-built?

So amazing, the amount of incredible science we’ve been able to do with the Voyager program.