Daniel Quinn @ danielquinn @lemmy.ca

Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

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Joined

2 yr. ago

This is a common problem with Free software, and honestly I think it's our biggest one: we build stuff for ourselves and stop there. If we want our stuff to be adopted (which, for things that rely on network effects, we do) then we need to pay more attention to usability.

Here's a suggestion for anyone starting a project they think they might share. Before you start writing any code, write the documentation. Then rewrite it from the perspective of the least tech-literate person you know who you'd still want to use the project. Only after you've worked out how easy it should be for this person to get started, then you can start writing the thing.

Israel has worked very hard to build that assumption everywhere it can, driving home that a lack of support for anything Israel does is somehow antisemitic. They use people like your wife as a shield for their crimes and a disturbing portion of her community is cheerleading their genocide.

They are doing this in her name, whether she "cares about politics" or not, so I would suggest she get out there with her community and remind the world that Israel does not speak for her.

Or just to bring the housing prices down for them to afford.

GitLab. The CI is fantastic.

Please tell me that your username is a reference to Rainbow Rangers. My 5 year old daughter would be tickled pink.

I think what he's missing is that he's approaching the question of "how do I make these people care?" from a liberal position. It just seems like such a weird question to even ask someone who cares about others by default.

If you think of it from the perspective of a self-centred conservative though, you can ask the question as "how can I frame the pain of others as their problem?"

Try talking about solutions in a way that affects them personally:

• You want transit and bike lanes 'cause nothing reduces traffic other than viable alternatives to driving. Get those other people off the road so you can drive.
• You want to stop sending weapons to Israel because we're spending your money on weapons for their war.
• You want to divest from fossil fuels because renewables have better energy security. Your costs don't go up whenever those people start a war over there.
• You want high taxes on the rich because they're festering parasites sleeping on a pile of gold and we want to spend that money on the poor so they aren't so desperate that they steal your shit.

These people do not (cannot?) care about how many children are killed by our bombs or about the fate of some bird, so constantly appealing to emotional arguments meant for liberals will never work on them.

Yeah this isn't a conversation we can have. If you're going to sit there and deny the international criminal court and somehow accept the killing of tens of thousands of children, many by sniper fire like it's comparable to bad tax policy then there's no hope for you.

So here's the thing. If someone is going to say with a straight face that they "stand with Israel", even when Israel is committing genocide in their name, then those people are effectively throwing in their lot with genociders and frankly I have little sympathy for them. Thankfully, nearly every Jew I've ever met has been very critical of Israel (including the Israeli citizens), many of which have confessed zero interest in an ethnostate, preferring a liberal democracy with no state religion. A secular state for both Jews and Muslims -- from the river to the sea if you will.

These people may well be the minority, but you'll forgive me if I won't accept the assumption that the majority of the 15 million Jews around the world support genocide. Call me a naïve optimist if you like, but I want to believe that most people are better than that.

Actually, this is one of the things that drives me crazy about Jesse's take on this. Putting aside for the moment the base selfishness that would lead someone to ask: "how does your committing genocide affect me?", he's taking Israel's position from the start that their actions are directly tied to the lives of Jews around the world. There are millions of Jews out there who are (a) not Israeli citizens, (b) are not Zionists, and (c) even actively condemn its actions purportedly in their name, but Jesse always starts with the position that Jews == Israel.

It's Israel's favourite shield: to claim that their actions are linked to Jews everywhere. They use it to smear any opposition to their war crimes as antisemitism, and lines of questioning like this only reinforce this link. You just can't bemoan how Jews are being linked to war crimes while starting from the position that Israel is inherently linked to Jewish identity. What you get is a conversation where both parties agree that Israel is both inexorably linked to Jews everywhere but that they're also not responsible for their safety because they can't be -- they're not Israelis.

To put it another way, no one would do an interview with the Iranian ambassador and suggest that they're somehow responsible for Islamophobia in Canada. That would be absurd, but because it's in Israel's interest to claim representation of all Jews everywhere, you get this ridiculous session where both parties agree on a distorted version of reality. Since journalism is supposed to be about distributing factual information, beginning an interview on such a flawed position is both illogical and irresponsible.

The former.

Responsible journalism is more than simply showing up for an interview and broadcasting whatever lie the subject wants you to share for them. If he's not going to fact-check the ambassador immediately, then he's operating as a defacto mouthpiece for his subject. Attaching a fact-checking document, after the fact, in an entirely different medium that outlines just how much of the interview was obvious propaganda is not journalism.

The worst part is that Jesse has levelled this very criticism in the past against other journalists! Specifically in reference to how Trump is covered, but others as well. You can't just hand your mic, your platform over to a 3rd party and claim that you're doing journalism when you're really being complicit in the distribution of propaganda.

GIMP is alright. Mostly I stick to it because Krita's dependency on QT means it looks and works differently from everything else in my GNOME environment.

The very existence of that scathing fact check document should have ensured that this episode was never published.

Five bucks says that this has nothing to do with general energy for the grid and everything to do with powering the fossil fuel extraction and processing industry in that region.

To be fair, you have alternatives.

I've been self-hosting my blog for 21years if you can believe it, much of it has been done on a server in my house. I've hosted it on everything from a dusty old Pentium 200Mhz with 16MB of RAM (that's MB, not GB!) to a shared web host (Webfaction), to a proper VPS (Hetzner), to a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster, which is where it is now.

The site is currently running Python/Django on a few Kubernetes pods on a few Raspberry Pi 4's, so the total power consumption is tiny, and since they're fanless, it's all very quiet in my office upstairs.

In terms of safety, there's always a risk since you're opening a port to the world for someone to talk directly to software running in your home. You can mitigate that by (a) keeping your software up to date, and (b) ensuring that if you're maintaining the software yourself (like I am) keeping on top of any dependencies that may have known exploits. Like, don't just stand up an instance of Wordpress and forget about it. That shit's going to get compromised :-). You should also isolate the network from the rest of your LAN if you can. Docker sort of does this for you (though I hear it can be broken out of), but a proper demarcation between your laptop and a server on the Open web is a good idea.

The safest option is probably to use a static site generator like Hugo, since then your attack surface is limited to whatever you're using to serve the static sites (probably Nginx), while if you're running a full-blown application that does publishing etc., then that's a lot of stuff that could have holes you don't know about. You may also want to setup something like Cloudflare in front of your site to prevent a DOS attack or something from crippling your home internet, though that may be overkill.

But yeah, the bandwidth requirements to running a blog are negligible, and the experience of running your own stuff on your own hardware in your own house is pretty great. I recommend it :-)

Canadaland recently did an episode on this very subject and as a once-supporter of these sites, I found it eye-opening.

Oh boy are you going to love-to-hate this then. It's best viewed on a proper computer, but you'll get the gist on mobile too.

To be clear, I'm not throwing shade. That's an impressive piece of software. It's just, given the number of stories I've heard (and experienced) about Bash's tricky syntax leading to Bad Things, I'm less comfortable with running this than I would be with something in a language with fewer pitfalls.

But if others take the chance and it sticks around a bit, I'll come around ;-)

Thanks for the contribution! It's a great idea, and with Google fucking about with blocking things like NewPipe, a project like this is a great answer to that.

That looks really impressive, but at nearly 1000 lines of Bash, I'm afraid I'm not comfortable running it on my machine. My Bash-foo isn't strong enough to be sure that there isn't a typo in there that could nuke my home folder.