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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AC
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  • Back when the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK turned out to have even more pervasive civil society surveillance than the US, and whist in the US the result of the revelations was some walking back of the surveillance, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, quietly kicked out the editor of the newspaper who brought out the story and the Press never talked about the gigantic surveillance aparatus in the UK ever again.

    So I have zero surprise that they're doing this and this is probably not even the whole tip of the iceberg, but the tip of the tip of the iceberg given the scale of surveillance over there.

  • Oh, I remember going to the Louvre well before Social Media and back then most people around the Mona Lisa were, just like nowadays, far more worried about taking pictures of it than actually just enjoying it.

    IMHO, people always tended to be weird around famous shit and famous people.

    It wasn't social media that made most people be like that. Most likely it's the reverse: social is successful because most people are like that.

  • Yeah, but at least we knew how to switch consoles.

    I bet that most Linux users nowadays don't event know the CTRL+ALT+Fx shortcuts to switch console.

    Can't say that the old days were really "good" compared to what we had now, but there was definitelly a lot of satisfaction in step by step getting the system to work.

  • Stories from the "good" old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it's still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.

    Of course, it won't be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.

    I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.

    I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it's the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I'm working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine's CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).

    If you're willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.

  • Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).

    Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn't actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).

    At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.

    Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP's post was like: yeah, if they're running X it's probably a too powerfull machine.

  • They could've gone down the Humanist route of "Never again shall this be allowed to happen to anyone", making it about the victims and their human suffering rather than their race, but instead they chose to make it about Race, keeping the way of seeing other human beings from before, just with different untermenschen and ubermenschen.

    The visual artifacts of NAZIsm might have been forbidden, but the whole judging and treating people differently depending on their race is a strong as ever.

    Their continued support for Israel whilst they're trying to commit a new Holocaust, shows that Racism as a way of viewing and relating to others in Germany is as strong today as it was in the 1930s.

  • Somebody tried to build a bridge between both groups but they ran into the conundrum that to get to the other side they would first need to get half way to that side, then get half way of the remaining distance, then half way the new remaining distance and so on an infinite number of times, and as the bridge was started from the science communicators side rather than the mathematicians side, they couldn't figure out a solution and gave up.

  • Some years ago I saw some graph that showed the proportion of people in each country of Europe whose maximum formal education level was Primary Education, Secondary Education and Tertiary Education an Portugal had lots of people with only Primary Education, then few with up to Secondary Education and then lots again with Tertiary Education, and having that gap in the middle is quite unique in Europe.

    The difference between the importance of Education for the Fascists (earlier, none at all, later just about enough to make them cheap factory workers) and for the post-Revolution governments (which were all leftwing), is like night an day, and Portugal definitelly shows how it's possible to invest in Education and undo many decades of severe under-Education of the population though you can't really undo the damage to the older generations (even with Adult Education, which was available if you lived in cities, but only used by a fraction of those who could've benefited from it).

  • FYI, Portugal has a massive disjunction in educational and reading level between people who grew up before the Revolution that overthrew fascism and those who grew up after.

    Fascism definitely kept people ignorant: mandatory education back then - and Fascism lasted until 1974, so we're not talking about the first half of the XX century - was only 4 years, which is just about enough to learn to read and that barely so, and access to anything beypnd that was nearly impossible for most people as the country was very agrarian and dirt poor.

    I'm Portuguese and some of my older aunts are functionality illiterate, whilst most of my generation in my extended family (so around 14 people in our 40s and 50s) have degrees - which shows the veritable chasm in the availability and quality of Education before and after the Revolution.

    The point being that minus that bulk of illiterate and near-illiterate old people who grew up during Fascism, the picture for Portugal changes a lot and, frankly, any 1st World country which is close to present day Portugal without having a whole generation that lived under a dictatorship which denied Education beyond the very basic to most people, doesn't really have an excuse for it.

  • Well, a decade ago I had hope too, but also already felt the guy was fishy (because he already had a history of overpromising and under-delivering and in the areas I was an expert in, I had spotted him outright lying) and so was skeptical about his promises and his companies. Also, having been involved in Tech Startups, my expectation from people in his position and his language were already negative since the Startup World back then was already dominated by scam artists with a salesmanship or Finance backgrund for whom Tech was a vehicle for self-enrichment, not by idealists who loved challenges or the actual Tech.

    Also by that point I had already spent a good period in Investment Finance and could recognize a certain style of bollocks a mile away.

    I wasn't aware of just how much a shit person the guy was, but all my instints told me he was a sociopath who would only ever do anything better for the World if it made him more money than not doing it.

  • The actual public meltdown started there, but before that there was already a history of sales bullshit with unachievable promises with things like the hyperloop and solar tiles, which for those who were paying attention were enough to mentally classify Musk as part of the "Fishy and possible scam artist" category.

    Musk hasn't really changed his swindling strategy much in the last couple of decades, he just started going beyond the script and sharing his actual opinions (which turned out to be "I'm a member of the Fascist elite" crap), possibly because the very cult of personality around him of all the fanboys made him think people loved him for him, rather than for the highly curate tech bro image (back when tech bros were seen as Heroes rather than Villains) he projected.

  • In my experience the waterfall one would be either be "a bicycle that was partly transformed into a monster truck when they figured out it needed to carry a lot more load, but kept some bicycle parts" or "a drag car were they installed an engine far too large for the body so it has no hood and the engine is partly out of the car, and yet the car is supposed to be used as a normal city car".

  • The Cult Of Agile with its Holy Practices that Must Be Done without actual logical and well thought about reasons (instead, the reason are things like "It's What It Says In This Agile Holy Book" and/or "That's What I Saw Other Agile People Do"), is not at all the same as the class of Software Development Processes called Agile.

    Then again, Software Development Processes are the kind of thing you tackle at the level of Technical Architect, and since there aren't really that many genuine Technical Architects (with the actual chops, rather than merelly 5-10 years experience in a single kind of development environment and a title obtained from a company that gives fancy titles as "promotion" instead of a proper salary raise) around, Agile is mostly just blindly followed without true understanding of what it does, what it doesn't do, how that is does it or why it cannot do it, and thus were and how it actually adds value and were it doesn't.

  • Musk was already a notoriously lying grifter 10 year ago.

    It's only naive fanboys who were too immature be able to set aside the natural human tendency to look up to famous people and/or did not had the life experience to recognize and be suspicious of salesman bollocks (whether decorated with techie terms or otherwise) when they heard it that didn't suspect the guy was something else than what the adoring fans thought.

    It's not by chance that Musk's fanboys were mainly young adult and teen techies.

  • Which other Holocaust-level Genocides were an organised force very purposedly exterminated over a million people because of their ethnicity are there?

    I mean, there have been lots of Genocides in History, some of the worst ones quite recently (for example the Rwandan Genocide), but ones were the machinery of the State set out to exterminate a population because of their ethnicity and involving such large numbers of civilian victim I can't think of any other than the Nazi Holocaust (were they use gas chambers to exterminate a civilian population) and the Zionist Holocaust which Gaza is turning into (were they are using starvation and targetted bombings of civilian buildings and refugee camps to exterminate a civilian population).

    The closest I can think of is how Ghengis Khan would conquer cities (when he came with his army, they either surrendered outright or if they didn't he would conquer them and then kill everybody in it, and that was quite independent of ethnicity) and that never involved as large a number of people as Gaza simply because there weren't as many people back then and cities were a lot smaller.

    Even the kind of shit Britain did in their Empire never reached this level in terms of numbers.

    I mean, if Israel stopped now, Gaza wouldn't be a Zionist Holocaust (just a "mere" Genocide), but with the support of the likes of the US, Germany and Britain, plus with over 80% of Israeli population supporting the Zionist "final solution for the problem of Gaza" this is bound to become on.

    So, yeah, if Gaza keeps going this way this will only be the second systematic mass genocide of a civilian population by a State power due to their ethnicity in History (so Holocaust-level) and Germany will have supported both Holocausts.

  • A new Holocaust.

    Supported by Germany, the US, Britain, but also countries like Argentina.

    Curiously, this makes Germany and Argentina some of the few (if not the only, ever) countries which supported TWO Holocausts.