NaibofTabr

There’s this quote attributed to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn’t change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

There are two lessons here. First - the best way to affect meaningful change is to start local. Rather than spending a lot of time agonizing over national politics, get involved in your community - your neighborhood, your town, your apartment building, even just the house you share with your family. Your community will take better care of you and the other people that you care about than any national government ever will.

Second - ultimately the only person whose behavior you can change is your own. Don’t be too harsh with other people when they don’t behave the way that you believe they should. Be a more stringent judge of your own behavior.

But temper that with this:

Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much. Or berate yourself too much either.

Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Baz Lurhmann

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

Or it plunges us back into the dark ages, where people believe things based on anecdotes and superstitions, and sources of factual information are rare and typically locked inside some walled garden or other.

This is just another form of control being asserted by the wealthy and powerful - knowledge is power. Removing effective access to knowledge keeps people in the dark, making them easier to manipulate.

Hold on to your public institutions. Fight for them tooth and nail. Collect books (unredactable, uneditable, un-paywall-able sources of information). Donate to libraries. Don’t patronize LLM systems. Prefer local storage and applications over cloud services.

And don’t romanticize ignorance.

Aaron Swartz was right about everything

Darths and Droids - Star Wars rewritten as a TTRPG campaign, started in 2007, still regularly updating, fantastic (ab)use of the source material

Also check out Dr. McNinja. It ended years ago but the entire series can be downloaded from archive.org (legally).

The spear in the Other’s heart
is the spear in your own:
you are he.

There is no other wisdom,
and no other hope for us
but that we grow wise.

-attributed to Surak

as written by Diane Duane in Spock’s World

Empathy is not some mere emotion that you feel - a fleeting reaction to some external sensation. Empathy is an intentional shifting of perspective, where you experience another’s circumstances as if they were your own.

This is a skill, meaning that it is something which you learn through practice, and that you do on purpose, until the doing of it becomes instinctive and no longer requires intent.

To say “I do not feel empathy” is to give yourself an excuse not to practice. This is a cop-out, used by weak people. Do not wait to “feel” it before you practice. Always remember you do not practice only for the sake of other people, but for the sake of your own growth and edification.

I’ve read a bit about Teflon. My understanding is that the big health hazard is during the application process, primarily for the factory workers - you really don’t want to breath aerosolized uncured Teflon, or get it in your eyes. It’s not the most hazardous industrial chemical out there, I don’t think there’s any particular ethical issue with manufacturing products with Teflon as long as workers are provided PPE. If it’s a sweatshop product well then there are obviously a lot of ethical issues.

Once it’s cured it’s chemically inert (which is kind of the whole point) - I’m not aware of any research showing that the human body can absorb any harmful chemicals from cured Teflon - basically your stomach acid and digestive tract bacteria can’t do anything to it. You shouldn’t worry overmuch about being harmed by cooking in a Teflon-coated pan, it’s not a heavy metal or anything like that.

That said, a deteriorating Teflon coating can be a hazard. The material is fairly stiff and again, your digestive system can’t break it down. Any small particles should (hopefully) pass through, but larger flakes could get stuck somewhere and then… well your body can’t break it down. It’s going to be there causing a blockage until something dislodges it, it’s not going to bend very much, and it might have sharp enough edges to irritate or damage the surrounding tissue.

And yeah, nothing breaks it down naturally, so it is just going to be in the world forever, gradually eroding into smaller and smaller particles along with all of the other plastic pollution, so yay.

I can’t point to any specific sources on this, it’s from reading various articles over two decades, I’m definitely not an authority.

This concept is inherently flawed. There is no static form of ‘true’ self.

Who you are now is different from who you were five years ago, and who you are tomorrow will be different from who you are now. Who you are changes depending on who is in the room with you, because your relationship with that person changes the context of your actions and interactions.

This is not to say that personality or identity is fungible, but that it is not fixed and there is no end state (no goal).

We do tend to reflect and repeat behaviors that we observe, and I think there’s some truth in the idea that you become the average of the people you spend the most time with. With this in mind, think about who you feel most comfortable with in your life - the people who, when you spend time with them, you feel most at peace with yourself - then try to arrange your life to spend more time with those people.

In regard to “masking”, I’ll just point out that privacy implies that some things are not shared with others. Therefore, to have any privacy in your life some things must be hidden, including some thoughts, feelings and opinions. Having a private life is healthy and normal and doesn’t mean that you are suppressing your “true self”.

DuPont. Here’s just a little tidbit:

Between 2007 and 2014 there were 34 accidents resulting in toxic releases at DuPont plants across the U.S., with a total of eight fatalities.[93] Four employees died of suffocation in a Houston, Texas, accident involving leakage of nearly 24,000 pounds (11,000 kg) of methyl mercaptan.[94] As a result, the company became the largest of the 450 businesses placed into the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s “severe violator program” in July 2015.

Monsanto:

In Anniston, Alabama, plaintiffs in a 2002 lawsuit provided documentation showing that the local Monsanto factory knowingly discharged both mercury and PCB-laden waste into local creeks for over 40 years.[220] In 1969 Monsanto dumped 45 tons of PCBs into Snow Creek, a feeder for Choccolocco Creek, which supplies much of the area’s drinking water, and buried millions of pounds of PCB in open-pit landfills located on hillsides above the plant and surrounding neighborhoods.

These are the kind of companies that inspired the cartoon villains of the 1980s that just dump pollution because.

Beyond your eventual technical solution, keep this in mind: untested backups don’t exist.

I recommend reading some documentation about industry-leading solutions like Veeam… you won’t be able to reproduce all of the enterprise-level functionality, at least not without spending a lot of money, but you can try to reproduce the basic practices of good backup systems.

Whatever system you implement, draft a testing plan. A simpler backup solution that you can test and validate will be worth more than something complex and highly detailed.

I mean… exposed to each other, sure, but they’re all exposed to Syncthing and the public relays.

weird socks

It is a fantastic idea to start your home server project on some e-waste hardware, and use it until you know specifically what features you’re lacking that you would need better hardware for.

Er, wait, are you using Syncthing for its intended purpose of syncing files across devices on your local network? And then exposing that infrastructure to the internet? Or are you isolating Syncthing instances?

You’d think being people would be common enough… life has enough difficulty without us creating more for each other.

Yeah, don’t want to end up unemployed… better create some more monsters…

The only system that has sustained common cause in human societies long-term is religion. It’s outlasted nationalism and political ideologies, noble families and dynasties, and even the collapse of civilizations.

Which is terrifying, when you consider how much violence has been done in the name of religion throughout human history. Why do none of our more productive ideas and organizing principles have such longevity?

Who pissed in your gene pool? ^it ^was ^{^me}^

I want to watch this series.

Jesus the time traveler tells off assholes.