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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2024

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  • there needs to be an organized movement

    yeah…

    so here’s the problem with that.

    you’ve got your organized group, of people who agree that violence is necessary to fight against fascism.

    your group has a membership list with 100 names on it.

    and you think that’s great, your group is getting traction.

    except of those 100 people, 50 of them are undercover FBI agents.

    of the remaining 50 people, 40 of them are informants who are reporting to the FBI.

    oh, and someone in the group volunteered to do the boring, unglamorous work of maintaining the membership list, of taking the handwritten signup sheet you passed around and making it into a Google spreadsheet? that person is 1000% one of the FBI agents.

    seriously. go read about the history of COINTELPRO. read about how the post-9/11 FBI made entrapment of would-be Muslim terrorists into their bread & butter. if you enjoy podcasts, there’s one called Alphabet Boys that is about this exact thing. listen to the 5-4 episode about Hampton v United States if you want to know about entrapment, because it’s much more than “no, they don’t have to tell you they’re a cop, if you ask”.

    also, there’s a damn good chance someone is going to PM you saying “the people in that thread didn’t get it, I think you’re right, violence is necessary”. that person is an FBI agent.

    this isn’t about “oh I’m on a list already lol”. this is about they will charge you with federal crimes, and your public defender will tell you your only chance is pleading guilty. prosecutors love this shit because easy cases pad their conviction record.



  • I am basing that on both what I see on the news and what is happening to people all around me.

    what news sources are you consuming?

    because if you’re getting the message from the news that economic collapse is imminent and all currencies are going to be worthless and we will need to fall back to a barter-based economy…that is a function of choices you’ve made in your news diet, much more than it has anything to do with anything actually happening in the real world.

    and what specifically is happening to people around you that you’re referring to? do you have a pen-pal in Weimar-era Germany who you’re communicating with through a time portal? or are you talking with other people who have the same news diet as you do and forming a self-reinforcing worldview?


  • SMART can be used for a couple different things - one is just reading the health values reported by the drive, another is for instructing the drive to run tests of itself and then reporting the results. if you haven’t already, I’d recommend having it run the “long” self-test as that inspects the entire drive. it will often prompt the drive to report problems that it may not have noticed otherwise.

    a related thing to keep an eye on, especially with an old netbook like that, is the power & data connectors to the drive. buildup of dust, or corrosion on the contacts, or something like that, could cause symptoms that look like a drive failure, even if the drive itself is perfectly healthy.


  • Encryption lengths are getting long so you’d think it was high time.

    that’s unrelated - AES-256 for example can be executed just fine on either a 32- or 64-bit machine. in theory there’s nothing stopping you from running it on an 8-bit or 16-bit CPU (although other considerations related to the size of AES’s lookup tables make this unlikely). from some random googling, here is an implementation of Chacha20, another 256-bit encryption algorithm, for 8-bit microcontrollers.

    when we talk about 32 vs 64-bit CPUs, in general we’re only talking about the address space - the size of a pointer determines how much RAM the computer is able to use. 32-bit machines were typically limited to 4GB (though PAE helped kick that can down the road)

    CPU registers can also be sized independently of the address space - for example AVX-512 CPUs have a register that is 512 bits wide even though the CPU is still “64-bit”.


  • when people say “echo chamber” with negative connotations, what they actually mean is “a place that has a consensus reality, and I disagree with that consensus reality”.

    a forum for geologists bans flat-earthers. the flat-earthers will call it an “echo chamber”. they’ll ask why the geologists are so afraid to have their beliefs questioned. if they’re so sure the earth is round, shouldn’t they be willing to debate it?

    having a consensus reality is good, actually. and enforcement of that consensus is usually necessary to maintain the health of the community. geologists want to talk about…actual geology stuff. if flat-earthers are allowed, they’ll turn every thread into a debate about flat vs. round earth, and it will drown out the actual more interesting conversations the geologists were there for.

    when someone says “such-and-such is an echo chamber” you should look to see what the consensus reality of that place is, and what aspects of that consensus reality the complainer disagrees with.

    recently, I’ve seen a lot of people calling Bluesky an echo chamber, for example. if you dig into it…usually they posted some transphobic bullshit and got blocked by half the site. Bluesky isn’t perfect, but one thing they’ve gotten right so far is “trans people exist, and have the right to exist, and to live their lives free of harassment” is a pretty strong part of their consensus reality. people who disagree with that are inevitably going to run back to Twitter and whine about Bluesky being an echo chamber.


  • hello Cleveland Beehaw! happy to be joining this pleasant little corner of the internet.

    good news: I’m in the process of buying a house, after renting my whole life up to now. got lucky that the first home I toured in-person (after viewing probably 100+ homes on Zillow) I liked enough to put in an offer, and had the offer accepted. now I’m just going through inspection and mortgage approval crap.

    bad news: I broke my big toe. not broken broken, apparently just a tiny chunk of bone flaked off where the ligament is attached. I put off going to the doctor about it, because I woke up with my toe swollen and painful, Dr. Google suggested that it was probably gout, and I didn’t want to bother with a doctor visit if it was just going to be a lecture about eating healthier. so I hobbled around on a broken toe for almost 2 weeks before going in for X-rays and getting told it was broken. now I’m crossing my fingers that it’ll heal up on its own in the Fancy Medical Shoe they gave me, and I won’t have to have surgery on it. and it’s a good reminder that sometimes I need to push past my ADHD and medical anxiety and go to the doctor anyway.


  • it might be more complicated than you’re looking for (requires a self-hosted server instead of just a desktop app), but take a look at the ecosystem surrounding Subsonic

    Subsonic did some licensing shenanigans, but there’s an actively-maintained GPL3 fork called airsonic-advanced

    there’s also alternate implementations, Gonic and Navidrome, that maintain compatibility with the original Subsonic API

    because they all work with a common API, there’s a variety of clients that can work with the backend.

    I’m also a big fan of Beets for music organization, it’s not tied in to the Subsonic ecosystem so you can use them completely separately if you want. it handles tagging, can fetch lyrics, and can also transcode the library (or an arbitrary subset of it) if you want to send it to a portable device. (not sure if this is what you mean by compatibility)

    I currently have Beets organizing everything, run Navidrome on my server pointed at the Beets library directory, then Ultrasonic on my phone, and the Navidrome web interface on my desktop. the combo is especially nice for streaming to my phone - Navidrome will transcode FLAC to Opus on the fly, and Ultrasonic has an option to cache those files locally, and to pre-download them over wifi instead of mobile data. so I have my full collection available on my phone, can stream it from anywhere, and the songs I listen to frequently are already downloaded and I don’t have to waste mobile data, or wait for them to load if I have poor cell signal.