mo_ztt ✅ @ mo_ztt @lemmy.world

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40

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673

Joined

2 yr. ago

"What about what's in store for me if Hitler loses? The Nazis still control Brest, Lwow, and Kaunas, and Churchill isn't protecting me from any of that shit. Meanwhile, he's an open racist who supports atrocities in the colonies."

Like I say: Good luck.

You are, of course, free not to vote for him. If you really are a queer communist though, then good fuckin' luck with what's in store for you 2024-2028 if Trump wins.

WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU?

At a bare minimum you need a complex database structure to support products, stocks, orders plus the pages for browsing, searching, shopping, ordering, tracking, then you need user accounts, integrations with payments and shipping, a transactional email service etc.

Well, sure. You'll also need a filesystem to run it all on, cache memory with LRU replacement, a router, power and air conditioning, and lots of other stuff. The question was, what's an easy way to do all that that's ready to run. I've set up a couple different e-commerce sites on Wordpress and it's easy and flexible; everything you listed does need to happen, but it's behind the scenes of the plugin installation. I genuinely don't know of a turnkey solution that's easier, although I'm happy to hear about them.

I mean, Wordpress started as a blog. Linux started as a terminal emulator. The question is how well does its current state fit the current task at hand.

There are WordPress plugins that attempt it

Why do you say "attempt"?

it’s usually more for people who use it mainly as a blog/CMS and want to sell a couple of things on the side

So, I run a dedicated site that sells a few thousand items based on Wordpress+Woocommerce; it's basically a hobby, but if I wanted to be serious about driving sales one of the most important things would be the ability to customize landing pages, test out different layouts, make changes, etc... basically, the ability for the software to function as a CMS would be key to what I would want. Being "primarily" a CMS product with selling products as secondary, for me, works better than the other way around (primarily a product-listing-and-selling software with editing pages and layouts as secondary).

I wouldn’t use them for a large shop.

Depends what you mean by "large." Performance is probably the biggest issue that would make me hesitate to go for Wordpress+Woocommerce beyond a certain scale, but as I say I'm running a moderate-scale e-commerce site on Wordpress right now and I've generally been very happy with its tradeoff of "ease of setup" vs "customizability and extensibility for fancy stuff" vs cost.

Wordpress is the most beginner-friendly solution I know of in terms of fitting together nicely and smoothly. If you're doing it on your own server, you will have to do the Wordpress install yes, but that's true of any solution you pursue, and once the base is in it's very easy to add e-commerce functionality. There are a ton of Youtube tutorials that show the process in varying levels of detail, but this one shows a streamlined way to actually install and set up the Woocommerce plugin. You will have to enter products and etc, but actually installing the plugin is literally about a 30-second process.

I generally like to talk it up just because Wordpress is generally my go-to for easy setup of a new web site, whether or not it involves e-commerce; it's easy and well-supported and dedicated Wordpress hosting is probably some of the cheapest types of hosting you'll be able to find on the internet. That tutorial I linked about likes Bluehost; personally I prefer Tigertech but the point is there are easy and cheap options.

I'm happy to answer questions or help; I've set up a few different little amateur-mode e-commerce sites on Wordpress and I don't know of any easier solution.

Sort of. In Asia, as I understand it, there's a shared understanding (right or wrong) of who are the "upper" and "lower" parts of the hierarchy. The American version has each individual Republican placing themselves in the "top group" of their little hierarchy in whatever interaction -- so e.g. I can treat my kids however I want to treat them, but if the cops come and look into it, it's an affront to my freedoms and I'm down trodden and abused. Congress impeaching Trump is a grave injustice the likes of which has never been seen before, congress impeaching Biden is absolutely just and natural and anyone who says anything bad about it is a traitor. Etc.

Edit: Related story: An American military guy who was trying to conduct training in a particular non-Western culture wrote an extremely frustrated article in some military journal about his experience. Basically, what he was trying to say while trying super hard not to be racist about it, was that he'd noticed that if a student in his classes ever gave a wrong answer and he corrected them about it publicly, that person would be his enemy from that point going forward. Like it was some kind of mortal insult for him to suggest to the class that they didn't have the answers to everything already. To him with an American background this was a normal part of teaching, but in this culture it was some grave insult. He basically said, I've tried a bunch of different ways and I think I'm running up against just a fundamental aspect of this culture that makes it tough for adult people to ever learn anything. To me that's similar to the Ron Johnson behavior: A culture of "the people on top are in charge of everything" coupled with "I'm the people on top, I'm at the peak of my own little hierarchy and don't have to listen to anyone and can do what I want" in an extremely toxic way.

Why "similar to" Wordpress? Wordpress deploys on your own server and it's open source.

To them pushback equals betrayal. If your boss says some bullshit (especially if it's some self serving bullshit), you're supposed to tell everyone you agree. True and false don't matter nearly as much; it's mostly where your loyalties are, and who will go to bat for you and who won't. I haven't seen the clip, but my guess is his body language is more or less as if some trusted friend had stolen money from him or something, because that's how pointing out someone who's "above you" is lying reads, in their world.

Aaah, got it. Right, depending on the version of Windows, keeping it off the internet permanently might make it less prone to doing random stuff. To me it's highly unlikely that keeping it off the internet will increase security; there will be machines that are way more attractive targets for evildoers (because of the people on them doing stuff) and evil deeds that are way more dangerous than changing the signage. But if you just want to keep its configuration simple so the signs don't mess up then that kind of makes sense to me.

I think I misunderstood your setup a little; I thought the signs were their own hardware with their own IP addresses. If they're just screens of the windows machines it's a little simpler. You actually can set it up so that machine can see the LAN but never the internet, just by setting it with a static IP configuration with no gateway set. Then you have to go VPN to some other machine on its network, and then hop from there to the local-LAN-only machine that's hooked to the signs.

I actually forgot until just right now, but one time when I had this problem, I set up a Chromebox which was set to display a web page in full-screen mode, and used an extension which auto refreshed the page every few minutes, and then set up the web page to look exactly how I wanted it to (I used a Google Docs static export of a spreadsheet page, so I could automatically gather the right data from formulas and then futz around with the spacing and sizing and etc until it looked the way I wanted it to). You could do a similar thing, with a page that was served from some other place on your LAN. Then, the signage machine itself would never need to be accessed remotely or have any access to the internet; you could just unset the gateway, and periodically or automatically update the page that was getting served from the other machine without needing to touch the signage machine.

Anyway good luck, hope all this gives you some ideas. Probably your IT department will have specific ideas how they want to set it up anyway, but going into it with things a little thought through might help yes.

Why do you want to keep it off the internet, though? That's going to make things more complex both in the setup and in the day-to-day operation. The example you listed of being difficult to upload files is one example. The only reason I can think of to do it that way would be for security but I'm not sure how much actual security benefit it would carry.

How about this? You could do the two-interface solution like I described, but have the internet-facing interface disabled most of the time -- could be disabled in Windows settings, so someone has to have physical access to the machine in order to reenable it when you want to update the sign. Or, it could be disabled at the switch / router level: Just disable the port for that machine, and reenable it temporarily any time you need remote access to the machine to do something, but in the steady state leave it on its own little disconnected network with only the machine and the signs, and no internet access anywhere.

I actually agree with you on the vast majority of what you're saying. In particular, how Trump's crimes are a grave threat to democracy in the US, whereas the allegations about Hunter Biden are basically harmless in the grand scheme of things (although, you didn't answer my question on whether Trump's New York business crimes are also basically harmless in your eyes.) And, I agree that at least to some degree Hunter Biden is being prosecuted specifically because of the Republicans wanting to weaponize law enforcement against their enemies.

But it sounds to me like you're wanting to go further than that, into using that all as a reason to make the factually untrue claim that Hunter isn't actually being accused of anything criminal (which, all the allegations could be false, but it's hard for me to see the DOJ under Biden claiming that he didn't file taxes for some year when he actually did, or otherwise go into the realm of the trivially disprovable just to harass him). And then when I list specific crimes, you start saying that allegations of those crimes are no big deal, because look at the Republicans!

Which is, of course, what the Republicans tend to do when their crimes are pointed out. In my opinion it's crooked and dishonest when they use that whataboutism, which is why I don't want to do the same for "my side". More to the point, Hunter Biden isn't "my side." Neither is Jared Kushner. They're both just mostly-private individuals who may or may not have done something wrong, and if they did something criminal and it can be proved in court, then they should be convicted. Why does it need to be more complicated than that? Why should anything on the Republican side mean that Hunter Biden gets a pass?

I feel like we're going in circles a little bit so we may have to agree to disagree. But that's how I see it, at least.

Is it a big deal to me? 0%. I don't give a shit what happens to Hunter Biden. The only reason I care about this story at all is that it's nice to see well-connected white collar criminals getting charges for once. If you'd replied to me asking how much this is worth as a scandal, or pointing out that what Matt Gaetz did was worse, then we could have had a nice agreeable conversation about yeah I agree with you on that. Instead you told me that he did "not really anything unlawful," and that's how we started talking.

I mean do you feel the same way about Trump's trial for business fraud in New York? If someone said that in that venue he's just guilty of being privileged and well off, not really anything unlawful, how would you feel about that?

Again: What?

You asked "what is the real issue with Hunter's behavior?", making it sound like he never committed any crime, so I listed some of the crimes he allegedly committed. Not paying or not filing taxes are technically crimes, yes. They're rarely prosecuted though. If you owe some money, you're probably fine, especially if you're in communication with the IRS. If you're falsifying your deductions and you owe millions to the IRS and are years behind on your filings you may be in trouble, yes, and they may tack on charges for money you didn't pay or years you filed late once they're annoyed at you.

Like I say, I'm not interested in whataboutism about Matt Gaetz in order to downplay anything Biden did. Firearms violations and tax charges are not the worst thing in the world, no. In comparison with what Jeffrey Dahmer did, what Matt Gaetz did wasn't that bad. Neither comparison is relevant. Just charge the people with what they committed, whether it's white-collar crime or predatory sex or serial murder. Which yes, means I think Matt Gaetz should have gotten charges. That doesn't mean, though, that I want to try to pretend Hunter Biden didn't do anything (or allegedly do anything; he still has his day in court to defend himself from the allegations.)

What?

The indictment alleges that from tax years 2016 through 2019, Hunter Biden didn't pay at least $1.4 million in self-assessed federal taxes, and that he filed false returns for tax year 2018 in order to evade the assessment of taxes. The indictment alleges that the president's son "subverted the payroll and tax withholding process of his own company by withdrawing millions outside of the payroll and tax withholding process; spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills; in 2018, stopped paying his outstanding and overdue taxes for tax year 2015; willfully failed to pay his 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 taxes on time, despite having access to funds to pay some or all of these taxes; willfully failed to file his 2017 and 2018 tax returns, on time; and when he did finally file his 2018 returns, included false business deductions in order to reduce the very substantial tax liability he faced as of February 2020."

That's according to NPR.

Is that worse than paying a minor for sex? Honestly, I don't care; they're both crimes, so charge both of them.

Honestly, it's probably pretty accurate that the prosecutors bowed to Republican pressure. Hunter Biden initially got the same "eh, I don't really want to open this can of worms" treatment that Matt Gaetz and Jared Kushner got. Then the Republicans got involved, and now he's getting treated like a normal person who broke the law.

Is that a bad thing? To me, not really. Now do Gaetz and Kushner.

What I would do in this scenario is give the Windows machine two network interfaces, and have the second interface connected to a little static network with just the signs and the Windows machine on it (i.e. no internet access). Then, you can access the Windows machine through TeamViewer or whatever. It'll have access to the internet but the signs won't be directly visible from the internet. And if someone from the internet is accessing your internal network to tamper with the signs via the Windows machine then you have bigger problems than them tampering with the signs.

In most worlds, if someone you work with tries to have you killed, it's not surprising if you testify against them (and more generally stop being "on their team").

In the modern GOP, it is. A lot of people in this country think that what Trump did is fine and what Pence did is wrong.

I don't really know, but I get the worrying sense that the courts don't realize what a big deal this is.

Cancel any other cases for any Trump-involved judge. Have 24/7 military grade protection for all court staff and everyone's families. Have the NSA involved in tracking down every single person who makes every single threat to the safety of anybody, and prosecute them. The alternative is that the collapse-of-democracy-o-meter ticks one small mark closer to 100. I'm not trying to be all panicky about it but the country has essentially bottomless resources to deal with Trump's cases with the gravity and urgency that they demand, but they're being assigned this priority alongside 1,000 "business as usual" things. This isn't a normal case with normal consequences. Make it a priority.

I for-real forgot that new reddit existed. I've stopped posting there but still read "all" periodically, and "old.reddit.com" is so ingrained that I was a little confused when they started talking about a new look, since I haven't noticed anything...

I was going to type this as a joke, but on reflection I think it's 100% unironically true:

The only reason they care is because Ireland's right-wing hooligans are actually willing to physically mob up and attack immigrants and police, whereas a lot of the right wing in the US is too skeered to get into the streets and do the same un-stochastically ever since Ashli Babbit. They wish their followers here would do the same and can't wait for it to start to happen.