The Bard in Green @ thebardingreen @lemmy.starlightkel.xyz

* Technology Consultant.

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2 yr. ago

So this is... what I do for work, just now in my leisure time?

There's a learning curve, but if you're familiar with WAF's it's not hard.

If you want to DIY something, I have a bash script that builds OpenResty with NAXSI from source. Most of the web apps I write anymore are actually in Lua, for OpenResty, maybe with an API written in something else. But I also help other members of my team deploy their Node and Python apps and stuff, and I always just park those behind OpenResty with NAXSI, just doing a standard nginx reverse proxy.

Every computer I own is an autobot. My primary machine is always Optimus Prime, has been since 2008. Other machines get other names generally slightly inspired by their role / nature. Bumblebee and CliffJumper are miniPCs of various persuasions, Preceptor is my "mess around with AI" box, my big server that handles most of my data and network services is Wheeljack, my Macbook is Mirage, my backup server is Powerglide, my TV (which is an old Dell all in One running Linux Mint) is UltraMagnus.

Back in the day I had like five Reddit accounts. I still log into one of them sometimes (no it's not my main one, that one turned into obscene invitations for u/spez to bugger himself with a hot poker, I'm not exaggerating).

Posting this here again. If we want to solve problems, we need to understand their cause:

This really tracks for me. I grew up around wealthy liberals and am intimately familiar with how these motherfuckers think. I have been telling my friends for months that we cannot expect the Democratic establishment or our current batch of elected Democratic representatives to address the problem.

• People are like "Don't they understand that it's a war?"
• Most of these people think we're idiots for thinking of it as war.
• Their high spending donors think we're idiots for thinking of it as a war.
• They think Republicans are angry idiots who have to be negotiated with so we can "get on with business."
• They see Republican voters MAGAing and rioting on Jan 6th and they think "What a bunch of yahoos!" (my multimillionaire boomer dad's literal words).
• They see Leftist protests turning out en-masse and they think "What a bunch of yahoos!" (again, my multimillionaire boomer dad's literal words).

My father has literally said about the second Trump presidency.

• "This will all blow over."
• "You just watch, the system will slow all of this down."

See, it's not just our "elected dems in office," who don't seem to get it, it's the entire leftish / center leaning, privileged ass, rich ass, mostly white, mostly older demographic, all comfy with their owning of multiple homes and their inflated stock portfolios and their rubbing shoulders with billionaires. We complain about the "elected dems in office," because we see them out there being like this in public, in the news in front of everybody. But this whole demographic is like this and that's why we keep seeing it.

EDIT:

The only way we'll change this is to STOP ELECTING DEMS FROM THAT DEMOGRAPHIC. They're not "spineless cowards," they just DON'T ACTUALLY REPRESENT YOU. They represent other neolibral rich people (people just like them, in other words). Those people's highest values are

• Stability.
• Business Economics (the price of gas and eggs doesn't really effect them that much).
• Maintaining their comfy "compassionate upper class" culture.

They DO genuinely care about

• Philanthropy (usually of a sort of egocentric variety).
• Social safety nets (most of them genuinely value compassion especially when it doesn't really cost them anything).
• Sound fiscal policy.
• Science (they believe in climate change and worry about their children and grandchildren).
• They LOVE to reassure and prop themselves up by talking about all the good they're able to do because they're rich / influential.
• On that note, they tend to embrace a kind of leftist, New Agey take on Prosperity Gospel and see wealth as something that enables them to do good in the world and help people (See? Greed is GOOD!). Some of that has merit, but it is NOT nearly as true as they tell themselves and others it is.

Faced with chaos and instability they will

• Try to negotiate with the people causing it, to get things "back to normal."
• Compromise with those people to keep things as stable as possible Every. Fucking. Time.
• Run off to meditation retreats and vacation homes and time shares in Hawaii or ritzy parts of Mexico to "find their center."
• Abandon their higher values to circle the wagons around the first, basic three (Stability, Business, Culture).

Importantly,

• They DO NOT see you as being "like them," "their people," or "part of their culture." They're actually VERY aware that you are NOT part of their culture.
• They usually honestly think that that's because they made better choices than you. They ARE able to acknowledge that there are people less fortunate then them, and even that they may have an obligation to these people. But they don't think they OWE you anything.
• When I say culture, I'm not talking about your Italian heritage, your black southern cuisine or how your abuela only speaks Spanish. I'm talking about private school / charter jets / fundraiser dinners / owning a mint condition classic car / keeping your boat in the garage of the OTHER house you own on the same street as your primary home.
• They do not feel obligated to go out of their way to defend your culture. Although if your culture is artistic, entrepreneurial, agitates for social justice, or is tangential to their own religious beliefs (looking at you Buddhism), they might be willing to fund it.
• They DEFINITELY feel entitled to exploit or profit off your culture, if they see an opportunity to do so, and will pat themselves on the back for "the good they're doing in the world" and "how they were able to help people" the WHOLE WAY TO THE BANK.
• This doesn't mean they're bad people or lack compassion for you.

When we're asking our congressmonsters to fight, we're asking them to take up our values in ways that many of them (rightly or wrongly) see as abandoning their own core values. THAT'S why they're angry.

They're NOT cowards. They just don't actually value the same things you do and their core priorities aren't in the same place yours are. They never have been. And as long as we primarily elect Dems from this demographic, they NEVER will be.

EDIT:

People who want to just STOP VOTING DEM, like this will do anything other than further degrade the world as you shit more ineffectual, inactive anger into it...

NO. Let me be very clear: Evidence shows you are JUST MAKING THE PROBLEM WORSE. Not liking it doesn't make it not true. We need to find dems, especially state and local, who come from a different background and support those people. You could BE one of those people instead of whining on the internet.

See, these people I'm talking about here --^ will ALWAYS conclude that they lost because they were too far left and lost the moderate vote. Their political consultants will ALWAYS tell them they lost because they ran too far left. The DNC will tell them they lost because they ran too far left. And they will get feedback FROM THEIR PEERS (that is, other neoliberal rich people) that they lost because they ran too far left. Isn't that a shame? Isn't that such a bummer? That is who they will listen to, not your thrown away vote, not your abdicated power, not your hipster ass nihilism, but at least you have your fucking principals to keep you warm at night, as Palestinian children die, migrant families are locked in cages and Christian politicians look for ways to charge women who have abortions with murder. That all can't possibly be partly your fault, can it?

That's why I say above, we have to STOP ELECTING DEMS from that demographic if we want change. We can't pressure those people into changing, they won't. They are who they are, they do what they do. They're richer than you, they think they know more than you and they're not going to listen to you. We have to replace them.

But WHEN YOU DON'T VOTE FOR THEM WHEN YOU HAVE NO OTHER OPTIONS, you JUST EMPOWER REPUBLICANS. And Republicans are ACTUALLY stupid, evil AND crazy.

You can't create change by not voting, and you can do nothing but harm by encouraging others not to vote or to throw their votes away on a third party. We have First Past The Post voting. Do you see it going anywhere? Are YOU doing anything to make it go away? No? Then shut the fuck up about your third parties and not supporting dems. You have no logical leg to stand on. At BEST you have gravely miscalculated the situation and failed to understand the math at work. At BEST!

Get out there and support DIFFERENT dems. And if those dems don't win... vote AGAINST Republicans. PLEASE.

https://runforsomething.net/ or shut the fuck up. You are wrong in a stupid, destructive way, LITERALLY like climate deniers. There's no point in arguing with them and I'm done arguing with you.

You see Charles, they will always hate and fear amphibians. There can never be peace and understanding between us and them.

*Croak

We still have an FDA?? Cool! Protect it!

Not voting for them has never once, in the history of history, gotten them to change. It actually causes them to pull further right.

try { useToiletPaper(); }catch(Exception $e){ cussWords($e); rinseHands(); dryHands(); useToiletPaper(); }

Although,

$Shower = new $Shower(); $Shower->washAnus();

may be an acceptable alternative under some circumstances.

does this issue not apply to other programming languages? dependency hell exists outside of python too yk…

This is like I have a swimming pool and a snapping turtle from the local estuary sometimes ends up camped out in it. But YOU have a swimming pool and it's full of alligators. When I complain that I don't wanna go in your swimming pool, you're like "Doesn't yours ALSO sometimes have dangerous reptiles?" And I'm like...dude...

I'm been a developer for a long time. I know what a normal amount of pain is. This stack causes an ABNORMAL amount of pain, like badly designed exercise equipment a bunch of sycophantic fitness bros keep pumping on social media, even though it regularly causes back injuries.

I think Python devs only think it's normal because you're used to it or something.

allso, I’m not using too many modules

Great, but you picked a stack in the middle of a toxic garbage dump. Maybe it's the clean part of the garbage dump. IDK. I just wish people would stop, because there are so many awesome stacks out there, so I don't have MORE reasons to have to wade back in here.

And THAT is the origin of the Facebook analogy (the only reason I have to keep using this is because EVERYBODY ELSE IS).

I'm LITERALLY going through Python dependency hell again right this very second, trying to deploy some shit we need for next week and I'm just like I swear to god, this motherfucking broken ass ecosystem

🚀💥

As long as I continue to sometimes waste hours of my life on irresolvable dependency hell, after exactly following the "deploy my project" instructions, trying with multiple environment managers (venv, conda, poetry), watching my system environment somehow get broken even though I'm using some kind of virtual environment (happened to me just last week), I will continue to AGGRESSIVELY have the opinion that

• The only reason we're all still here is everybody else is.
• The only reason someone would actually voluntarily CHOOSE this tech stack, in 2025, is for comfort zone reasons, they don't know any better reasons, their boss told them to reasons, or the libraries they need are ONLY here reasons.

Thus the Facebook of programming languages.

And oh yeah, "so use docker." Dude, if your ecosystem only works reliably in carefully controlled containers, in 2025, the problem is your shitty shitty, stupid, chronically broken ecosystem, not me for being frustrated with it.

This problem IS AND HAS BEEN so bad that every few years someone does a WHOLE NOTHER BIG PROJECT to try to solve it, so now we have multiple buggy ass environment resolvers, non of which work well enough to be considered anything other than an embarrassment to the community, when compared with say the modern Lua or Rust ecosystems.

Like this stack ALL YOU WANT, I not only don't get it, I'm (I believe justifiably) grumpy and frustrated because when I want to use your shit, now I have to use this crummy stack. Thanks for that Python advocates. I'm so grateful to you for that. Thanks so very very much.

THUS the Facebook of programming languages. Facebook is "fun" and "easy to get started with" too. Lua is JUST AS EASY to get started with, but its' ecosystem doesn't do this to me. Explain that, if you can.

I know you're human beings like me and you deserve compassion, but damn it, I have wasted SO MUCH TIME trying to get your broken, buggy ass shit to work, and I'm VERY frustrated about it. You're not gonna talk me down.

I don't care about how easy or fun the syntax is. The syntax is irrelevant to me. I care about how borked up and bloated the ecosystem is, and how so many "here's how you deploy my project" instructions fail horribly to work due to unexplainable dependency conflicts, and how fragile and unstable and specific and unforgiving the complex web of virtual environments (and their multiple different managers) are just to run some 5,000 line script someone wrote that requires shittylib 2.1.3 and pieceofgarbagemodule 0.5.1, but shittylib 2.1.3 requires abandonedproject 4.1.1 and pieceofgarbagemodule 0.5.1 requires abandonedproject 3.0.99 and "pip failed to resolve dependencies after 15 minutes of installing shit because we didn't write it to do that, fuck you, hahaha, modify your requirements.txt to use a different version of abandonedproject lol!" That shit is unacceptable in the modern world, given the alternatives available.

I will die on this hill, regardless of hate and downvotes.

Neither did he last administration and neither will the next.

That's like saying that neither tepid bath water nor boiling tea water are "cold."

Ah Python, the Facebook of programming languages.

The Syrrannites being called a "violent cult" was propaganda by a corrupt regime trying to rewrite Vulcan history to keep themselves in power. They were deliberately suppressing beliefs and practices related to the Vulcan telepathic nature, because this posed a threat to them.

Vulcans, valuing rationality as they do, reacted differently than humans would to the exposure of the misconceptions and outright lies that had been propagated by Vulcan high command. Most of society reevaluated their beliefs and taboos around telepathy and the more spiritual nature of being Vulcan. By the time of TOS, Vulcan society had mostly reconnected with their more spiritual and pacifistic traditions and abandoned the more modern, arrogant and hypocritical views espoused by the High Command of the Enterprise era.

This tells an interesting story actually, of how humans and Vulcans (and Andorians) benefited on a societal level and became better people together through the cultural interactions and exchanges that took place during that era. Prior to Enterprise, we kind of knew that humans had benefited technologically and culturally through their contact with Vulcans. Enterprise showed us how Vulcans benefited and rediscovered themselves (and went through major and positive cultural revival) as a result of their contact with humans. I think it's kind of a beautiful story.

What the other poster said. Is it possible to skip all those episodes? Probably, if you're okay with getting dropped into an episode like

"Wait, weren't they under attack by a huge battlefleet? What happened? How did they survive?"

"Wait, this character is dead? How did that happen??"

You'll also have to skip the season finale of season 6, the first few episodes of season 7, and most of the last episodes of the series, including the series finale. The story arcs of at least four main characters will be resolved in Prophet / Pah Wraith episodes. The whole Dominion plot line becomes heavily entwined with the Prophets / Pah Wraiths and the major events of the later parts of the series we'll make zero sense without that context.

tl:dr; power through, don't do it, it gets better.

Saying it again here: The only infrastructure we can trust is our own.

Even if there are still a number of services that are strongly above average trustworthy, they are ALL under attack in multiple "free" countries.

It's Trump-proofish

• I approve of Matrix and Nextcloud.
• Proton unfortunately is probably the easiest option for now. We need better self hosted / anonymous email servers, but spammers and scammers have probably ruined that for everybody forever and fuck them all to hell for that. Best option is to just abandon email for anything sensitive.
• All the alternative social media is better, but they can still absolutely feed the lot of it into an LLM and then ask the LLM to print out a list of "likely dissidents." I would be shocked if this isn't coming soon to a United States near you - then again, I'm one to talk posting this on Lemmy, using a username I've used for close to two decades, from an instance that runs on a server I rent from a corporate cloud host.
• OS should be Whonix, Tails or Qubes.
• Browser should be Tor Browser (or at least get a mention). PRACTICALLY, for most people, I would recommend Brave over LibreWolf (for reasons of stability, compatibility, more frequent security patches and the fact that the Mozilla project has been unfortunately going to shit lately). Yes the company sucks, but the browser consistently scores top marks on real world privacy and security tests.
• No mention of FDE or post quantum crypto. Quantum chips are coming effing fast, if they're not already here. I have reason to believe both the US and China can currently make practical use of Shor's algorithm, although only in a targeted and VERY expensive way... but Moore's Law man, plus I can't prove it and I can't say more. Post quantum doesn't seem to be on most people's radar (most troublingly, the Tor project).
• Anything to do with phones is literally fucked, like "This is fine" dog level fucked. If you MUST be mobile (like basically everybody trying to do basically anything), you must accept you're probably NOT really fascist proof, unless you go to some pretty extreme lengths and REALLY know what you're doing.

As far as your average normie (or even above average competence tech saavy user) goes, this is close to as Trump proof as you're likely to get right now without help and support. So great, but it has holes in it a fascist regime could drive a brigade of tanks through, and unless you EITHER have that help and support OR really know what you're doing, you should be thinking about that REALLY hard, every day.

We collectively decided decades ago that centralized services are more convenient and better able to connect us to the people and content we want to be connected to (although we were very deliberately herded in that direction by oligarchs). Now we will pay the price.

tl:dr; The only infrastructure we can trust is our own. Not liking that, and not having the skills or resources to do anything practical about it (tragically, terrifyingly) doesn't make it not true. Plus needing to stay connected to the people and resources we can ONLY access through third party services and infrastructure, continues to make us reliant on those services and infrastructure, unto our own ruin.

You can't take the sky from me.