blightbow

blightbow, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Vote for useful things and voting reform at the local level.

Vote for whatever keeps the system itself functioning at the federal level. If one party's leaders are in bed with "presidents for life" or the authoritarian governments that were ratfucked to make them presidents for life, you are going to end up with a president for life.

Important to note: If enough states enact voting reform at the local level, you no longer need a constitutional amendment to have voting reform that influences the federal level. If you are looking for real change, this is where it is. It is slow and unsexy, but don't bitch about your federal vote meaning nothing if you're not doing anything with your local elections.

blightbow, 6 months ago

"buh buh buh the government deserves to die and everyone living in the country must suffer because my feelings are hurt"

Yeah, I know you have a lot more to say than that, but the caustic and reductionist debating angle cuts in both directions. A very merry fuck you as well, sir.

blightbow, 6 months ago

Realistically, the US Government is going to continue supporting Israel no matter what happens until the US has meaningful voting reform. Israel is an entrenched interest due to the amount of money changing hands in Washington. (defense contracts, etc.) This is not helped by the social stigma of the average American not differentiating between Israel as a political entity and Jewish people as a demographic. It's one of those "broken by design" social constructs.

The logical fallacy that I largely see in play is the assumption that the Republicans would have handled this any differently. While I agree that Biden's stance is noteworthy, as a reminder that the parties are more alike than they are different on certain topics, it doesn't change the landscape of the two leading presidential candidates. One of them is in bed with Putin and appears to have a vested interest in entrenching himself as a leader who can never lose an election. (i.e. an aspiring president for life) The other candidate is still flawed, but doesn't represent an existential threat to the political institution itself.

I'd much rather have an option other than Trump or Biden, but until more states enact voting reform at a local level we're stuck with a choice of which decrepit old man is least likely to be disruptive to the entire system of government. The Republican party needs to continue its losing streak until it decides the populist authoritarian movement is a failed strategy.

blightbow, 4 months ago

The title of that article does not support its conclusion. Lazy pasting what I commented the last time I saw this.

Nothing has changed for LTS at all. Scroll down to the pretty graphs on https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle, and pay particular attention to how the ratio of orange to purple on the LTS graphs has changed over time. (it hasn't) The base LTS support window has always been 5 years, and the extended window has always been another 5 years.

What they did add was additional security updates for Universe packages, which are represented by the black line. Note that this black line is independent of the LTS coverage. From https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-pro-faq/34042:

Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS or HIPAA, on top of an Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Pro was launched in public beta on 5 October, 2022, and moved to general availability on 26 January, 2023. Ubuntu Pro provides an SLA for security fixes for the entire distribution (‘main and universe’ packages) for ten years, with extensions for industrial use cases.

You can also dig into this AskUbuntu answer for even more details, but the long and short of it is this has no impact on Ubuntu LTS whatsoever. Keep using it if that is your thing. Keep using something else if it is not.

This old news will become newsworthy if Canonical starts shifting packages out of the main repo and into universe, which would in fact reduce the security update coverage of LTS releases. That said, the article has not asserted any evidence of this. Nothing to see here...for now.

blightbow, 6 months ago

Nah, it's pretty evident that either you don't understand or are willfully ignorant/trolling. In the off chance that you are in fact that confident in yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Tactical_voting

When I was younger I was one of those "enlightened centrists" who believed in things like the purity of my vote, but reality caught up with me eventually. There is no merit to such purity in first past the post systems with an entrenched plurality.

The only virtue of a wasted vote is the personal satisfaction that you get out of it, and that personal satisfaction has no real world effect on politics. The only exception is when you are voting for a visionary with overwhelmingly popular support. (i.e. you would know if one is in the race)

blightbow, 6 months ago

The time is now, but I'd like to suggest that you're looking at it through the wrong lens.

The way we do better is to tackle the problem at the root, which is voting reform. Voting reform breaks up the plurality. Breaking apart the plurality gives you more than two viable parties and forces those parties to caucus together. It also makes it harder for corporate lobbyists to support extremist parties and candidates. (i.e. if the Republican party was split into moderates and MAGA, it draws more attention when corporations support MAGA over moderates)

Here is my personal checklist that I use for elections at both the local and federal level:

1. Does one of the candidates support an effort to install someone into a seat of power for life? (directly or indirectly) That's worse than anything we have now, so that's a big no. We have to hold things together for the time being.
2. Does the candidate support alternative voting systems, such as ranked choice voting? Does their political record suggest that they aren't full of shit? Then they've got my vote.

#1 is a problem at both the state and federal level. #2 isn't realistically going to go anywhere at the federal level any time soon, but it's possible to move that needle at the state level. (see Alaska, where ranked choice voting has had a measurable impact on local elections)

tl;dr, have a long term political objective and vote consistently. The needle is not going to move fast. Play the long game, and don't let the media focus on federal elections distract you away from local elections. Voting reform has to start at the state level and grow outward from there, because most congress critters are there for the money.

blightbow, 6 months ago

No one cares what either of us are, it was only relevant to my anecdote. :P Your commenting pattern appears to have become somewhat manic, so I'll leave you to it.

blightbow, 6 months ago

Supervillain is giving him too much credit. I'll grant you that he's a cartoon character, but cartoon supervillains have more complexity than him.

Kanye and Musk embody a nearly identical archetype and we'd have the exact same problem if they ran for president and succeeded. The cult of personality that follows shitty celebrities is a self-perpetuating one. It's rooted in nasty people admiring how important people can be nasty like them but without tangible social consequences. They form a mob around their cult heroes for that exact reason, strength in numbers. A safe space for the trash of humanity.

People in politics and business find Trump useful because he'll open doors for them in exchange for attention. They get cozy with leading him around by the nose with that attention until they forget that he will backstab them when they stop giving him that attention or there is more value in betraying them. Musk does the exact same shit, so again, I don't think that Trump himself is worthy of being viewed in the light you're giving him. Similarly shitty celebrities are drop in replacements for him, and worse, they might be more intelligent in their cruelty.

blightbow, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

The people that cancel good people are shitbags.

Relativity remains a factor. One mob's shitbag is another mob's hero. One mob's wish for freedom of thought is another mob's moral depravity.

Cancelling is just an added nuance on gossip and dogpiling, and those have been around since we've been knocking rocks together. It happens whenever a person publicly acknowledges an opinion that angers a tribe enough to single someone out. It doesn't matter whether that person is a long-time resident or a passing visitor. The more it goes against their social values, the more popular it becomes in the gossip, and the more people share it with each other as the story takes on a life of its own. Details get changed. Maybe it started with a lie or misconception to begin with and grew from there. None of that matters when people start shunning you in public or knocking on your door with torches in hand.

The only added nuance of cancelling over traditional gossip is the pervasiveness of the internet, and the distance at which people can socially band together to shun you. Most importantly, gossip has never required someone to be a good or bad person. It just needs someone to be the target of a rumor (truthful or otherwise) that pisses a lot of people off.

blightbow, 4 months ago

Independents don't like either of them, we just like Trump and the evangelical authoritarians less. Same as it ever was.

We'd like an option outside of the doddering old man column, but we're stuck with milquetoast and authoritarian flavored infirmity for the time being. Either the national committees need to be reclaimed by people who aren't lobbyists/authoritarians, or the states need to continue figuring out voting reform at the state level.

blightbow, 4 months ago

It was a multi-prong attack. The goal was to generate uncertainty in the validity of results certified by the states, and create a justification for Mike Pence to delay certification.

Run a search on mike pence delay certification fake electors and take your pick.

blightbow, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Yeah, there is no need for "final solution" style accountability here. This was a project that a single developer was working on when the stars just happened to align and drive a lot of attention to it at once. A commercially oriented website in the same situation would struggle to deal with it and be forced to take out loans in order to expand staffing and infrastructure capacity.

The phrasing of Ernest's initial post suggests that there is at least one exploitable vulnerability that spammers are taking advantage of and can't be openly discussed until the gates are closed. I understand the frustration and optics problem that comes with "easy and important fixes" sliding on the schedule (i.e. the topic of the other thread), but look at it this way:

• Ernest is too slammed with work to be consciously creating more work for himself.
• He needs the spam and bot problem to go away so ASAP so that it stops taking time away from him. This includes the missing moderation tools, spam/bot campaigns that are operating at a scale that those additional tools would have difficulty addressing regardless, and the issues he can't talk about yet that were hinted at above.
• If he is waiting to push out a fix to problems that would greatly reduce his workload, there are very good reasons for it.
• If he is not able to push out fixes that reduce his workload, it stands to reason that fixes unrelated to them are also sliding.

blightbow, 2 months ago

Honestly, no. People are pretty bad at filtering for Unicode alternative characters. It can be worked around when the site admins understand what's going on, but...have fun skimming all of the Unicode code pages for every possible lookalike character.

blightbow, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

It is not. The headline is completely inaccurate.

Nothing has changed for LTS at all. Scroll down to the pretty graphs on https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle, and pay particular attention to how the ratio of orange to purple on the LTS graphs has changed over time. (it hasn't) The base LTS support window has always been 5 years, and the extended window has always been another 5 years.

What they did add was additional security updates for Universe packages, which are represented by the black line. Note that this black line is independent of the LTS coverage. From https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-pro-faq/34042:

Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS or HIPAA, on top of an Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Pro was launched in public beta on 5 October, 2022, and moved to general availability on 26 January, 2023. Ubuntu Pro provides an SLA for security fixes for the entire distribution (‘main and universe’ packages) for ten years, with extensions for industrial use cases.

You can also dig into this AskUbuntu answer for even more details, but the long and short of it is this has no impact on Ubuntu LTS whatsoever. Keep using it if that is your thing. Keep using something else if it is not.

Edit: This old news will become newsworthy if Canonical starts shifting packages out of the main repo and into universe, which would in fact reduce the security update coverage of LTS releases. That said, the article has not asserted any evidence of this. Nothing to see here...for now.

blightbow, 6 months ago

Irony: I clicked on this post because an unemployed friend of mine recently had their mechanical turk account suspended for no clear reason. They're still waiting on the appeal process two months later...

For anyone considering this work, you should also be prepared for your "employers" to randomly reject your submitted work and deny you pay. Good times.

blightbow, 2 months ago

The headline undersells the outcome by a lot.

As part of the judgment by the US District Court of Rhode Island, Tropic Haze was issued with a permanent injunction preventing it from offering or marketing Yuzu or any of its source code in the future.

Its members are also prevented from creating any future software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection, and Tropic Haze must surrender all website domains and information related to its emulator.

Ownership of all related websites and domains must be turned over, and the developers are barred from further participation in "creating any future software that circumvents Nintendo's technical protection".

The wording of the actual settlement will be key here, which we are unlikely to ever see. At a minimum it puts significant controls on how the individual developers can interact with the Nintendo emulation community, if not outright prevents them from contributing code to most Nintendo based emulators. It almost certainly increases their individual liabilities if they are caught assisting such a project again, as they will be forced defend how their contributions don't violate the settlement. And that's just to avoid stiffer penalties being thrown at them.

blightbow, 9 months ago

A hypersexualized Paladin whose test of faith is to invite admiration from all who observe him or her, but they’re not actually allowed to partake. Imagine an extremely vain god or goddess who not only wants all of the sexiest people alive as their followers, but wants them to proactively blueball the rest of the world with their piety.

Or just take the easy route: a good old fashioned fertility deity who approves of their followers sewing dem oats.

blightbow, 8 months ago

Wizards of the Coast: "That's the spirit!"